Cook confirms in Shanghai that Apple Intelligence is approved for China, with a beta this month
Cook told The Paper in Shanghai on Oct 15 that the first batch of Apple Intelligence features is approved for China, as a beta this month. Siri AI is excluded.
On October 15, Apple board executive chairman Tim Cook confirmed in an exclusive interview with The Paper in Shanghai that the first batch of Apple Intelligence features has been approved for mainland China and will ship as a beta “later this month.” The interview added two things earlier reporting only paraphrased: Cook’s own confirmation, and three large-model filing numbers readers can look up themselves. Apple’s own China page lists support for iPhone 16 models and later, iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max and iPhone Air.
Key points
- Confirmation and timing: Cook said in Shanghai on October 15 that Apple was “very pleased” to have approval to bring the first batch of core Apple Intelligence features to Chinese users, with the test build arriving “later this month.”
- Filing numbers: The Paper, citing the MIIT’s October 14 network-access notice, reported that the iPhone Duo (China model A3721) and other models added three filing numbers in a September 29 certificate renewal — Shanghai-AppleZhiNeng-202506160057, Shanghai-TongYiWanXiang-202410090024 and ZheJiang-TongYiQianWen-20230901.
- What is excluded: the beta carries live translation, the Photos cleanup tool and writing tools only; Siri AI is not part of it.
What Cook actually said
The interview, headlined as an exclusive and published from Shanghai at 16:48, is the primary source. Cook’s words: “We are very pleased to have been approved to bring the first batch of core Apple Intelligence features to Chinese users, including real-time translation, the cleanup tool in the Photos app, and writing tools.” He added that he looked forward to offering those features “in the upcoming beta later this month.”
The same piece has him talking about the foldable iPhone Duo — “every time I open it I can’t help smiling,” calling it “very nice in the hand, especially the hinge.” The trip also took him to Blue Box, a home and sleep brand that The Paper says runs a large Mac deployment and does on-device AI with Mac minis.
One clarification on his title, because several outlets wrote it loosely: Cook is Apple’s executive chairman, not its CEO. Apple’s April 20, 2026 news release states that John Ternus became CEO on September 1, 2026, that Cook moved to executive chairman, that Arthur Levinson became lead independent director, and that Ternus joined the board. The release says Cook’s chairman role includes helping with parts of the business, “including engaging with policymakers around the world” — which is why regulatory news came from him rather than from the new CEO.
The regulatory trail
The approval was not a single event. The dates line up.
On July 8, “网信中国” published a batch of filings for on-device generative AI services on phones; the “Apple Intelligence” entry sat under Apple Technology Development (Shanghai) Co., Ltd., and the announcement went out on July 15. On September 2 the iPhone Duo received a trial network-access certificate; on September 29 its certificate was renewed with the large-model filing numbers attached.
The real increment came on October 14, when MIIT’s telecom equipment network-access notice showed the September 29 renewal also covered the iPhone 18 Pro series, iPhone 17 Pro series and iPhone Air. The Paper listed three filing numbers, covering Apple Intelligence, Tongyi Wanxiang and Tongyi Qianwen. A caveat we can’t clear: The Paper quoted the notice rather than showing it, so we have not seen the original MIIT page or the July cyberspace announcement, and the Bloomberg original is paywalled. The numbers themselves are identical across Chinese reports, which is decent but not conclusive.
Two of the three numbers point at Alibaba (Tongyi Wanxiang, Tongyi Qianwen). That matches the Bloomberg account recorded in our October 14 digest: Alibaba’s Qwen and Tongyi Wanxiang models supply text and image generation with MIIT filings already in place, while Baidu handles search plus parts of Siri and visual intelligence.
The device list still disagrees
Sources do not agree on which phones qualify, so the conflict is worth stating plainly:
| Source | Device scope |
|---|---|
| Apple China page (via The Paper) | iPhone 16 models and later, iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max, iPhone Air |
| Paopaowang, MyDrivers | iPhone 15 Pro and later Pro/new models, iPhone Duo |
| SCMP (relaying Bloomberg) | iPhone Duo, iPhone 18 Pro, and as far back as iPhone 15 Pro |
These are not the same list at different lengths. Whether iPhone Air counts, and whether the Duo falls under “and later,” gets different answers. Apple’s own Chinese support page is the closest thing to an authoritative answer, but it can change with the push — the reliable move is to re-check on the day the beta actually lands.
Market context and the counter-view
Yahoo Finance, carrying Reuters, gives the commercial backdrop: Greater China revenue grew 38% year over year to $25.53 billion in the December 2025 quarter, 28% to $20.50 billion in March, and 22% to $18.82 billion in June, each ahead of Apple’s overall growth of roughly 16–17%. Over the trailing four quarters China was about 17% of revenue ($79.34B of $466.83B), against roughly 16% a year earlier.
The same piece is blunt that “the driver was hardware”: the base iPhone 17 nearly doubled iPhone 16’s China unit sales in its first 10 days. AI is something new to sell in the next phase, not the reason China recovered. That framing matters here, because the growth rate is decelerating — 38%, then 28%, then 22%. Apple’s fiscal Q4 results on November 2 cover a quarter that ended before the AI beta arrived and that laps the weakest China figure of the past three years ($14.49B). The real test is the December quarter, comparing against $25.53 billion with AI available through the holidays.
IBTimes’ analysis supplies the counter-view: approval is a regulatory and commercial milestone, not evidence Apple has pulled ahead. Huawei, Xiaomi and other domestic makers have already spread AI across their hardware, software and ecosystems, and price, cameras, battery life, software support and habit all keep shaping upgrade decisions — AI, it argues, is unlikely to be the only factor. It also flags that Chinese users will look hard at what is processed on-device versus sent off the device, and that explaining that boundary clearly is what earns trust.
What to watch
Per a roundup by ZhiDongXi (republished by Sina Finance), Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman had reported that the official mainland version is expected in December with iOS 27.3 — and that it still leaves out the new Siri AI, Image Playground and the newest Genmoji, with text-generation tools restricted. So the October beta and the December release are two stages of a staged rollout, with functionality still missing in the middle.
The fuller timeline: Apple Intelligence debuted in iOS 18.1 in 2024, and mainland China users were left out of it from the start. Our October 2 entry on Apple tightening disk access for AI agents covered the company shutting a door; the HomeView launch on October 13 showed it opening another, though only the HomePod mini 2 sold in mainland China. This filing and approval closes the last obvious gap in Apple’s China AI story — but it closes it feature by feature, batch by batch, model by model.
For teams shipping products in China, the practical task now is checking the call paths and language coverage for the three features in the first batch — translation, photo cleanup, writing tools — because they will go live without waiting for anyone. And the date to watch is the day the beta actually pushes: real values for the device list, region, language and build number beat every advance report.