The Apple Siri AI icon is being displayed on a smartphone, with Apple Intelligence in the background.
Jonathan Raa | Nurphoto | Getty Images
Apple’s big artificial intelligence push faces some big challenges in China — one of the iPhone maker’s most critical markets — as Beijing maintains strict rules around the buzzy technology.
The uncertain path in China comes at a time when Apple’s market share is being eroded in the world’s second largest economy by a resurgent Huawei and other local smartphones players, which are talking up their AI features.
Apple Intelligence is the Cupertino giant’s play that aims to bring AI across its devices. It features an improved version of Apple’s voice assistant Siri, as well as features that automatically organize your email or transcribe and summarize audio footage.
Apple said that Apple Intelligence will roll out in U.S. English this fall, with additional languages, features and platforms due to arrive over the course of next year. The company was, however, quiet on the product offering in China during the AI launch at its annual developers conference this month.
That’s likely to do with China’s stringent rules on AI, analysts told CNBC, as Apple tries to figure out how to approach the complex market.
“China is in another world when it comes to AI given the regulatory environment there, so China is a big asterisk on Apple’s big announcements last week,” Bryan Ma, vice president of devices research at IDC, told CNBC via email.
Beijing has enacted various regulations over the past few years focused on areas ranging from data protection to large language models — the massive sets of data that underpin applications like ChatGPT.
China’s AI market is heavily regulated. Some of the rules include requirements for LLM providers to get approval for the commercial use of their models. Generative AI providers are also responsible for taking down “illegal” content.
Apple’s China AI challenges
Navigating these rules will be tricky for Apple.
Firstly, some of the features of Apple Intelligence are based on Apple’s own language model, which runs on both the phone and on the company’s own servers.
Under Chinese rules, Apple would likely need to get its AI model approved by authorities.
Secondly, one of the biggest announcements this month was that Apple’s voice assistant Siri can tap into OpenAI’s ChatGPT for certain requests — but ChatGPT is banned in China, meaning Apple would have to find an equivalent domestic partner.
Baidu and Alibaba are among China’s technology giants that have their own LLMs and voice assistants, ranking them as companies with which Apple can potentially partner.
Meanwhile, China’s internet is heavily censored with regulators concerned about the potential for AI services to generate content, which may go against Beijing’s views or ideology.
The likelihood is that Apple will have to build an on-device AI model and a cloud-based AI model that complies with local regulations, Canalys analyst Nicole Peng told CNBC over email.
The other part of the equation on AI for Apple to be successful in China, according to CCS Insight Chief Analyst Ben Wood, is for the company to create a localized AI experience on its devices that appeals to Chinese users.
“Localising the Apple Intelligence experience will be a major challenge for Apple,” Wood told CNBC. “As with all technology deployments, there are nuances to the way the service is delivered to respect the specific customs, regulations and use cases in a particular country.”
Privacy
A key part of Apple’s pitch during the AI launch was its focus on privacy. The company announced Private Cloud Compute, whereby AI is processed on servers owned by Apple. Apple said that data processed is not stored.
Whether the tech titan will be able to fully own its own servers is another question. Chinese iCloud data is stored inside servers located in China which are run by a third party.
This could mean Apple might require a similar partnership for its AI computing servers, opening the tech giant up to critcisms about how private the data actually is.
“Maintaining complete user privacy in an AI era in heavily regulated markets such as China will be the biggest test for Apple yet,” Neil Shah, partner at Counterpoint Research, told CNBC. “Its going to be challenging for Apple to have fully controlled own private compute servers in China.”
CCS Insights’ Wood said Apple’s focus on privacy could help introduce AI features to the market. China passed a major data protection law in 2021, which looks to limit how information is collected and stored.
“Apple’s on-going focus on privacy and security practices may help placate local regulators and Apple has not been afraid to make concessions when required,” Wood said.
Apple’s path to AI in China
CNBC has contacted Apple over Private Cloud Compute and the company’s AI ambitions in China. A spokesperson did not directly address those questions, but pointed CNBC to an interview in the Fast Company business magazine with Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering.
Federighi expressed the desire to bring Apple Intelligence to China.
“We certainly want to find a way to bring all of our best product capabilities to all of our customers,” he said in the Fast Company interview, adding that “in some regions of the world, there are regulations that need to be worked through.”
The Apple executive said the process was under way to introduce the AI products to China, but gave no timeline.
Smartphone makers globally are talking up their AI features as a way to sell high-end phones to consumers who want to hold onto their device for longer.
Apple has been facing a number of challenges in China, where its market share fell to 15% in the first quarter of 2024, versus 20% in the same period the year before, according to Canalys data. Huawei, whose smartphone business was crippled by U.S. sanctions, revived once more and is now the biggest smartphone player in China, where it competes with Apple with phones targeting the premium segment.
Apple’s lag behind domestic rivals in launching AI features in China is unlikely to be detrimental to iPhone sales.
“For Apple, deploying China-grade Apple Intelligence is going to be a marathon and not a sprint. It will be deployed in phases over the years until Apple is confident and until then it will have to face some competition,” Counterpoint Research’s Shah said.
Wood said Apple’s control of its hardware and software integration will allow it to deliver a different experience from that of its rivals.
“Apple has an uncanny ability to explain its services and features better than rivals, even if it is essentially delivering the same experience or a subset of what rivals can offer,” Wood said.
“Despite the current focus on AI by rival China-based smartphone makers, Apple should still be in a strong position.”
Microsoft owns lots of Nvidia graphics processing units, but it isn’t using them to develop state-of-the-art artificial intelligence models.
There are good reasons for that position, Mustafa Suleyman, the company’s CEO of AI, told CNBC’s Steve Kovach in an interview on Friday. Waiting to build models that are “three or six months behind” offers several advantages, including lower costs and the ability to concentrate on specific use cases, Suleyman said.
It’s “cheaper to give a specific answer once you’ve waited for the first three or six months for the frontier to go first. We call that off-frontier,” he said. “That’s actually our strategy, is to really play a very tight second, given the capital-intensiveness of these models.”
Suleyman made a name for himself as a co-founder of DeepMind, the AI lab that Google bought in 2014, reportedly for $400 million to $650 million. Suleyman arrived at Microsoft last year alongside other employees of the startup Inflection, where he had been CEO.
More than ever, Microsoft counts on relationships with other companies to grow.
It gets AI models from San Francisco startup OpenAI and supplemental computing power from newly public CoreWeave in New Jersey. Microsoft has repeatedly enriched Bing, Windows and other products with OpenAI’s latest systems for writing human-like language and generating images.
Microsoft’s Copilot will gain “memory” to retain key facts about people who repeatedly use the assistant, Suleyman said Friday at an event in Microsoft’s Redmond, Washington, headquarters to commemorate the company’s 50th birthday. That feature came first to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which has 500 million weekly users.
Through ChatGPT, people can access top-flight large language models such as the o1 reasoning model that takes time before spitting out an answer. OpenAI introduced that capability in September — only weeks later did Microsoft bring a similar capability called Think Deeper to Copilot.
Microsoft occasionally releases open-source small-language models that can run on PCs. They don’t require powerful server GPUs, making them different from OpenAI’s o1.
OpenAI and Microsoft have held a tight relationship shortly after the startup launched its ChatGPT chatbot in late 2022, effectively kicking off the generative AI race. In total, Microsoft has invested $13.75 billion in the startup, but more recently, fissures in the relationship between the two companies have begun to show.
Microsoft added OpenAI to its list of competitors in July 2024, and OpenAI in January announced that it was working with rival cloud provider Oracle on the $500 billion Stargate project. That came after years of OpenAI exclusively relying on Microsoft’s Azure cloud. Despite OpenAI partnering with Oracle, Microsoft in a blog post announced that the startup had “recently made a new, large Azure commitment.”
“Look, it’s absolutely mission-critical that long-term, we are able to do AI self-sufficiently at Microsoft,” Suleyman said. “At the same time, I think about these things over five and 10 year periods. You know, until 2030 at least, we are deeply partnered with OpenAI, who have [had an] enormously successful relationship for us.
Microsoft is focused on building its own AI internally, but the company is not pushing itself to build the most cutting-edge models, Suleyman said.
“We have an incredibly strong AI team, huge amounts of compute, and it’s very important to us that, you know, maybe we don’t develop the absolute frontier, the best model in the world first,” he said. “That’s very, very expensive to do and unnecessary to cause that duplication.”
President Trump’s new tariffs on goods that the U.S. imports from over 100 countries will have an effect on consumers, former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told CNBC on Friday. Investors will feel the pain, too.
Microsoft’s stock dropped almost 6% in the past two days, as the Nasdaq wrapped up its worst week in five years.
“As a Microsoft shareholder, this kind of thing is not good,” Ballmer said, in an interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin that was tied to Microsoft’s 50th anniversary celebration. “It creates opportunity to be a serious, long-term player.”
Ballmer was sandwiched in between Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and current CEO Satya Nadella for the interview.
“I took just enough economics in college — that tariffs are actually going to bring some turmoil,” said Ballmer, who was succeeded by Nadella in 2014. Gates, Microsoft’s first CEO, convinced Ballmer to join the company in 1980.
Gates, Ballmer and Nadella attended proceedings at Microsoft’s Redmond, Washington, campus on Friday to celebrate its first half-century.
Between the tariffs and weak quarterly revenue guidance announced in January, Microsoft’s stock is on track for its fifth straight month of declines, which would be the worst stretch since 2009. But the company remains a leader in the PC operating system and productivity software markets, and its partnership with startup OpenAI has led to gains in cloud computing.
“I think that disruption is very hard on people, and so the decision to do something for which disruption was inevitable, that needs a lot of popular support, and nobody could game theorize exactly who is going to do what in response,” Ballmer said, regarding the tariffs. “So, I think citizens really like stability a lot. And I hope people — individuals who will feel this, because people are feeling it, not just the stock market, people are going to feel it.”
Ballmer, who owns the Los Angeles Clippers, is among Microsoft’s biggest fans. He said he’s the company’s largest investor. In 2014, shortly after he bought the basketball team for $2 billion, he held over 333 million shares of the stock, according to a regulatory filing.
“I’m not going to probably have 50 more years on the planet,” he said. “But whatever minutes I have, I’m gonna be a large Microsoft shareholder.” He said there’s a bright future for computing, storage and intelligence. Microsoft launched the first Azure services while Ballmer was CEO.
Earlier this week Bloomberg reported that Microsoft, which pledged to spend $80 billion on AI-enabled data center infrastructure in the current fiscal year, has stopped discussions or pushed back the opening of facilities in the U.S. and abroad.
JPMorgan Chase’s chief economist, Bruce Kasman, said in a Thursday note that the chance of a global recession will be 60% if Trump’s tariffs kick in as described. His previous estimate was 40%.
“Fifty years from now, or 25 years from now, what is the one thing you can be guaranteed of, is the world needs more compute,” Nadella said. “So I want to keep those two thoughts and then take one step at a time, and then whatever are the geopolitical or economic shifts, we’ll adjust to it.”
Gates, who along with co-founder Paul Allen, sought to build a software company rather than sell both software and hardware, said he wasn’t sure what the economic effects of the tariffs will be. Today, most of Microsoft’s revenue comes from software. It also sells Surface PCs and Xbox consoles.
“So far, it’s just on goods, but you know, will it eventually be on services? Who knows?” said Gates, who reportedly donated around $50 million to a nonprofit that supported Democratic nominee Kamala Harris’ losing campaign.
AppLovin CEO Adam Foroughi provided more clarity on the ad-tech company’s late-stage effort to acquire TikTok, calling his offer a “much stronger bid than others” on CNBC’s The Exchange Friday afternoon.
Foroughi said the company is proposing a merger between AppLovin and the entire global business of TikTok, characterizing the deal as a “partnership” where the Chinese could participate in the upside while AppLovin would run the app.
“If you pair our algorithm with the TikTok audience, the expansion on that platform for dollars spent will be through the roof,” Foroughi said.
The news comes as President Trump announced he would extend the deadline a second time for TikTok’s Chinese-owned parent company ByteDance to sell the U.S. subsidiary of TikTok to an American buyer or face an effective ban on U.S. app stores. The new deadline is now in June, which, as Foroughi described, “buys more time to put the pieces together” on AppLovin’s bid.
“The president’s a great dealmaker — we’re proposing, essentially an enhancement to the deal that they’ve been working on, but a bigger version of all the deals contemplated,” he added.
AppLovin faces a crowded field of other interested U.S. backers, including Amazon, Oracle, billionaire Frank McCourt and his Project Liberty consortium, and numerous private equity firms. Some proposals reportedly structure the deal to give a U.S. buyer 50% ownership of the company, rather than a complete acquisition. The Chinese government will still need to approve the deal, and AppLovin’s interest in purchasing TikTok in “all markets outside of China” is “preliminary,” according to an April 3 SEC filing.
Correction: A prior version of this story incorrectly characterized China’s ongoing role in TikTok should AppLovin acquire the app.