Privacy Is Priced, Not Principled

Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series. AppleInsider had a story yesterday that's getting covered as a flex: Apple trained its own LLM for China instead of just using Google Gemini like it does everywhere else. Proprietary model, Alibaba's help behind the scenes, first company to launch a homegrown AI model in the country. Neat, right? Apple doing its own thing again. Except that's not really what happened, and the actual mechanics are a lot more interesting than "Apple built an AI." Gemini was never on the table for China. Not because Apple didn't want it — Google's services are blocked there outright. So "Apple chose not to use Gemini in China" is a strange way to describe a decision that was never Apple's to make. What was Apple's decision was how to comply with a legal requirement that foreign companies run generative AI services on a domestic partner's model rather than deploy their own. The approval that finally cleared in July, after 22 months of waiting, split the…