alibaba news, stories and analysis

Bar chart comparing Apple Greater China revenue: Q2 2025 at $16 billion and Q2 2026 at $20.5 billion, a 28 percent increase, illustrating the stakes behind Apple Intelligence China rollout

Apple trains a custom AI model for China with Alibaba

Apple Intelligence China rollout uses a custom LLM trained with Alibaba's Qwen, making Apple the first US firm approved to ship a proprietary AI model in China. The move reshapes how global builders approach the market.

Lars Cornelissen · Aug 14, 2026

Donut chart showing Qwen3.8-Max mixture-of-experts parameter distribution. Only 95 billion parameters are active per request out of 2.4 trillion total, meaning 3.96 percent of the model computes for any single token.

AI

Alibaba Qwen3.8-Max narrows open-weight frontier gap

Qwen3.8-Max is Alibaba's 2.4T open-weight model ranking fifth in text and second in vision on Arena. The gap with US frontier labs narrows but does not close.

Lars Cornelissen · Aug 3, 2026

Abstract funnel data art of the China AI companion rules enforcement scale, narrowing from the 1,000,000 registered user threshold through the 100,000 monthly active user threshold to the 14,000 AI agents Shanghai removed, with the headline figure 14,000.

AI

China AI companion rules split work from emotional agents

China AI companion rules took effect July 15, 2026, forcing ByteDance and Alibaba to shut down companion agent features rather than retrofit compliance.

Lars Cornelissen · Jul 6, 2026