Apple has officially integrated Alibaba's Qwen large language model into its Apple Intelligence system for Mac users in mainland China, allowing the AI service to power Siri and Writing Tools features. The integration was confirmed through a new support page on Apple's China website.
The Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security is examining how Chinese AI companies circumvent export restrictions by renting Nvidia computing power located overseas, following recent technological breakthroughs that demonstrated their continued access to advanced chips despite Washington's controls.
China's cyberspace regulator has officially registered Apple's on-device generative AI service, Apple Intelligence, for use on iPhones in the country. To comply with local regulations, Apple is partnering with domestic tech companies including Alibaba and Baidu to integrate their AI models for Chinese users.
China implemented new regulations on July 15, 2026, prohibiting AI chatbots from fostering emotional dependency or replacing real relationships, forcing ByteDance's Doubao and Alibaba's Qwen to shut down their personalized AI companion features used by hundreds of millions of users.
China has begun limiting international travel for top artificial intelligence talent working at private companies including Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and DeepSeek, marking an escalation in Beijing's efforts to protect strategic technology and compete with the US in AI development.
Chinese AI startup DeepSeek released preview versions of its V4-Pro and V4-Flash models featuring up to 1.6 trillion parameters and one-million-token context windows, claiming to close the gap with frontier models while maintaining significantly lower pricing than US competitors.
MiniMax released model weights for MiniMax M2.7 on Hugging Face, a self-evolving agent model that scores 56.22% on SWE-Pro and 57.0% on Terminal Bench 2. The company also released MMX-CLI, a command-line interface providing native access to image, video, speech, music, vision, and search capabilities.
Alibaba led a $290 million funding round for ShengShu, a three-year-old Chinese startup developing AI models that aim to connect perception and action, moving beyond traditional large language models. ShengShu founder Zhu Jun stated the company aims to build models that are more general than LLMs.
Chinese AI company Z.AI unveiled GLM-5.1, a 754B parameter open-source agentic model that achieves state-of-the-art performance on SWE-Bench Pro and can run autonomously for up to 8 hours on long-horizon engineering tasks.
Rival AI companies OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google have begun collaborating to prevent Chinese competitors from extracting results from cutting-edge U.S. AI models, marking an unprecedented cooperation among typically competing firms.
