Apple Intelligence for iPhone users in China will be heavily censored

Apple plans to introduce its AI features, the Apple Intelligence, for iPhone, iPad, and Mac users in China by mid-2025, aiming for a launch by May.

This includes adapting the Apple Intelligence platform with the help of local partners, Alibaba and Baidu, as Bloomberg first reported from the publication’s anonymous sources.

The platform will then feature on-device AI models so that everything is run locally and not sent to the cloud. But, it still comes with content censorship and modification to comply with Chinese government regulations.

Apple’s partnership with Alibaba, a new AI player in town that just launched its new Qwen 2.5-Max model, means that the e-commerce giant will handle content censorship and add a layer to modify these AI outputs to comply with the censorship. The Chinese government has direct power over Alibaba to dictate censorship compliance.

Baidu, on the other hand, will be working on features like Visual Intelligence.

The report also mentions that if an Apple device in China runs an outdated model, the company will temporarily disable AI features until updates remove any prohibited content. iPhones that were purchased internationally will also not use the localized AI system when brought to China.

Perhaps, it’s similar to how the original DeepSeek-R1 model and its AI chatbot are heavily censored when it comes to the dealings of the Chinese government.

Though, some US-based companies, including Perplexity and Microsoft, have already embraced the open-source model. DeepSeek R1 is coming to Copilot+ PCs soon, but it’ll be NPU-optimized, while the model powers the Perplexity AI search engine but it’s unrestricted and US-hosted.