State Council Opinions on Deeply Implementing the "AI+" Action — Comprehensive Review

Executive Summary

The "Opinions on Deeply Implementing the 'AI+' Action" (State Council Document No. 11, 2025) was issued by the State Council on August 21, 2025, and published on August 26, 2025. It represents the most current top-level strategic document in China's AI policy system. Building upon the 2017 New Generation AI Development Plan, the Opinions shifts the policy focus comprehensively from technology R&D and industrial incubation toward "broad and deep integration" of AI across all sectors and domains of the economy and society. It explicitly aims to "reshape human production and life paradigms," promote a "revolutionary leap in productive forces," and drive "deep-level transformation of production relations."

The core concept of the document is "AI+" — positioning artificial intelligence as a general-purpose enabling technology to be systematically embedded across six priority fields: science and technology, industrial development, consumer upgrading, people's livelihood, social governance, and global cooperation. Unlike the 2017 plan, which focused on foundational research and industrial incubation, this document emphasizes application deployment, scenario-driven development, and society-wide adoption, reflecting China's strategic transition from an AI "construction phase" to a "deep application phase."

Key Provisions

The Opinions is structured around two major pillars: six priority actions and eight foundational support capabilities.

Six Priority Actions:

(1) "AI+" Science and Technology: Accelerating the construction and application of scientific foundation models, driving the intelligent upgrading of major scientific infrastructure, and promoting integrated development of AI-driven R&D, engineering implementation, and product commercialization. Notably, the document pioneers the introduction of AI into philosophical and social science research, proposing the development of an "AI for good" theoretical framework.

(2) "AI+" Industrial Development: Cultivating "intelligent-native" business models and formats, advancing whole-factor intelligentization of industry, accelerating agricultural digital-intelligent transformation, and innovating service industry development models. The document introduces the concept of "intelligent-native enterprises" — new business entities whose underlying architecture and operating logic are built on AI.

(3) "AI+" Consumer Quality Enhancement: Expanding smart service consumption scenarios (intelligent assistants, companion-type applications), and cultivating smart product consumption formats (intelligent connected vehicles, AI-powered smartphones and computers, intelligent robots, smart home devices, wearables).

(4) "AI+" People's Livelihood: Creating new AI-augmented work modalities with human-machine collaboration, integrating AI throughout the entire educational process, and building high-quality living through health assistants, AI-aided diagnosis, cultural industry development, and elderly and childcare services.

(5) "AI+" Governance Capabilities: Advancing intelligent upgrading of municipal infrastructure, creating an integrated public safety governance system spanning natural persons, digital humans, and intelligent robots, and enhancing land-sea-air integrated ecological governance.

(6) "AI+" Global Cooperation: Positioning AI as an "international public good for the benefit of humanity," promoting open-source accessibility, helping Global South countries build AI capabilities, and supporting the UN's central role in global AI governance.

Eight Foundational Support Capabilities: Enhancing model foundational capabilities, strengthening data supply innovation, bolstering intelligent computing power coordination, optimizing the application development environment, promoting open-source ecosystem prosperity, strengthening talent pipeline construction, fortifying policy and legal safeguards, and improving safety capability levels.

Goals and Timelines

The Opinions establishes three milestone targets:

2027 targets: Achieve widespread deep integration of AI across six priority fields; application adoption rates for next-generation intelligent terminals and AI agents exceeding 70%; rapid growth in smart economy core industrial scale; notably enhanced AI role in public governance.
2030 targets: AI comprehensively empowering high-quality development; intelligent terminal and AI agent application adoption rates exceeding 90%; smart economy becoming a major growth engine; advancing technology inclusivity and benefit sharing.
2035 targets: Fully entering a new phase of smart economy and smart society development, providing robust support for basically achieving socialist modernization.

Notably, unlike the 2017 plan's emphasis on quantitative industrial scale metrics (RMB figures), this document predominantly uses "adoption rates" and social penetration indicators, reflecting the policy shift from industrial scale toward comprehensive social intelligentization.

Implementation Mechanisms

The Opinions establishes the following implementation framework:

Coordination: The National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) is tasked with overall coordination and driving collaborative work efforts. This differs from the 2017 plan's MOST-led arrangement, reflecting the policy pivot from science and technology R&D toward comprehensive socioeconomic application.
Localized implementation: Each region and department is required to closely align with local conditions for tailored implementation.
Pilot leadership: Strengthening demonstration and pilot programs, with timely summarization and dissemination of best practices.
Financial support: Increasing financial and fiscal support, developing long-term capital, patient capital, and strategic capital, improving risk-sharing and investment exit mechanisms.
Standards development: Accelerating AI standards development in priority fields, promoting cross-industry, cross-domain, and international standards coordination.
Error tolerance: Establishing application scenario construction guidelines and improving trial-and-error management systems, embodying a prudent and inclusive regulatory philosophy.
Safety governance: Building safety capabilities across model algorithms, data resources, infrastructure, and application systems; establishing comprehensive technology monitoring, risk early-warning, and emergency response systems.

Industry Impact

The Opinions is expected to produce significant industry impacts across multiple dimensions:

Rise of the agent economy. The document repeatedly references "AI agents" (intelligent agents) and proposes "Agent-as-a-Service" as a new business model. This signals China's AI industry is transitioning from the foundation model competition phase to an era of agent application and commercialization, fundamentally transforming the software services landscape.

Whole-factor intelligent transformation. Requirements for the industrial sector have been upgraded from "partial AI application" to "whole-factor intelligent linkage" covering design, pilot testing, production, services, and operations. Traditional manufacturing faces comprehensive and deep intelligent transformation pressure.

Consumer market restructuring. The document positions intelligent connected vehicles, AI smartphones and computers, and intelligent robots as next-generation smart terminals, with adoption targets of 70% by 2027 and 90% by 2030. This will drive structural upgrading of the consumer electronics market on an unprecedented scale.

Education paradigm shift. The Opinions proposes integrating AI into "all elements and the entire process of education and teaching," transitioning from knowledge transmission to capability building and achieving "large-scale personalized education." This implies transformative disruption of the education sector.

Global governance positioning. By framing AI as an "international public good for the benefit of humanity" and emphasizing support for Global South nations in building AI capabilities and bridging the "intelligent divide," China signals strategic intent to secure a leadership role in global AI governance discourse.

Open-source ecosystem advancement. The document explicitly supports AI open-source community development, encourages universities to incorporate open-source contributions into student credit certification and faculty achievement recognition, and promotes the construction of a globally open open-source technology ecosystem. This will further enhance the international influence of Chinese open-source AI projects.

Amendment History

The "Opinions on Deeply Implementing the 'AI+' Action" was officially issued in August 2025 and is a newly released document that has not undergone amendments.

The document represents a continuation and deepening of the following policy lineage:

The 2024 Government Work Report, which first introduced the "AI+" action concept
The 2017 New Generation AI Development Plan, which established the strategic framework
The 2023 Interim Measures for the Management of Generative AI Services, which built the regulatory foundation

AI+ Action Plan