Apple’s AI partnership with Alibaba raises alarms in Washington

Apple’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad streak of regulatory woes just got a little worse. According to The New York Times, government members have raised concerns about the company’s partnership with Alibaba to bring AI features to iPhones in China. When Apple announced Apple Intelligence, it struck a deal with OpenAI to bring ChatGPT into the system as part of its AI offerings. Since OpenAI can’t operate in China, Apple went shopping for a domestic partnership the country. For the past few months, Apple has explored potential deals with Baidu, DeepSeek, and Tencent. However, it seems to have settled with Alibaba, whose open-source model Qwen has been improving rapidly. Apple is yet to publicly acknowledge its partnership with Alibaba, although its chairman appears to have already done that for them. Washington is watching Recently, officials from the White House and the House Select Committee on China have inquired about the deal. They have reportedly raised the issue dire ... Read full article.