On 26 August 2025, the People’s Republic of China State Council (the “State Council”) issued its “Opinion of the State Council on Deepening the Implementation of the ‘Artificial Intelligence Plus’ Initiative” (State Council Document [2025] No. 11) 《国务院关于深入实施“人工智能+”行动的意见》（国发〔2025〕11号） (the “AI Statement”.)
The AI Statement represents a milestone in China’s national AI policy and is the first statement of its kind.
Who is the State Council?
The State Council is the supreme administrative body of China, and is described in the Chinese constitution as China’s highest-level executive and administrative body. Its opinions or decrees therefore represent the opinions or decrees of the Chinese government, and in the nature of things will get carried out throughout China.
What is the purpose of the AI Statement?
The State Council’s AI Statement sets out a framework for China’s development and use of artificial intelligence, including in production and productivity, overall improvement in quality of life for China’s citizens, increased integration of AI into industry and daily life, and AI governance. The AI Statement also recognizes the significance of AI to humanity as a whole, calling for global cooperation on AI under the leadership of the United Nations among other things to solve humanity’s common challenges.
What is the ‘Artificial Intelligence Plus’ initiative?
The AI Statement rolls out China’s ‘Artificial Intelligence Plus’ initiative (“AI+ Initiative”). The AI+ Initiative aims to integrate AI deeply across various sectors of the Chinese economy and society, transform production paradigms, enhance productivity, and foster a collaborative intelligent economy and society using a people-centered approach. The focus areas include science and technology, industry, consumption, governance, and global cooperation.
Specific objectives include:
- Achieving extensive AI integration across over over 70% of six key sectors by 2027.
- Enhancing AI’s role in public governance, refining cooperation frameworks.
- By 2030, ensuring that the adoption rate of intelligent applications exceeds 90%, making the intelligent economy a significant growth driver.
- By 2035, transitioning to a new stage of intelligent economic and societal development, supporting the broader goals of Chinese modernization and ensuring that all citizens benefit from AI advancements.
Key AI+ Initiatives
The AI Statement identifies the following as the focal points of the AI+ Initiatives:
- AI+ in Science and Technology:
- Accelerating scientific discoveries using AI.
- Driving innovation and efficiency in R&D, with a particular mention of biotechnology production, quantum technology and 6G telecommunications.
- Innovating research methods in philosophy and social sciences.
- Development of the ‘AI+’ Industry:
- Cultivating new AI-native business models and formats.
- Advancing the intelligent development of total factor productivity.
- Accelerating the digital and intelligent transformation of agriculture.
- Innovating new models for service industry development.
- Enhancing Consumption Quality through ‘AI+’:
- Expanding new service consumption settings.
- Cultivating new product consumption models.
- ‘AI+’ for Public Welfare:
- Creating more intelligent working methods.
- Implementing more effective learning methods.
- Fostering a higher quality of life.
- ‘AI+’ Governance Capabilities:
- Pioneering a new paradigm of human-machine symbiosis in social governance.
- Building a new pattern of multi-faceted security governance.
- Painting a new ecological governance landscape.
- Global Cooperation on ‘AI+’:
- Promoting inclusive access to AI.
- Jointly building a global AI governance system.
- Enhancing foundational capabilities of AI models.
- Enhancing data supply innovation.
- Strengthening the coordination of intelligent computing power.
- Optimising the application development environment.
- Fostering a thriving open-source ecosystem.
- Strengthening talent development.
- Strengthen policy and regulatory safeguards.
- Elevating safety capabilities.
Conclusion
The AI Statement bears careful reading for clues on where China is headed on AI. China’s approach to AI development is focusing on pragmatic uses that accelerate scientific and industrial development, societal welfare, growth of the real economy, agricultural technology, AI governance and other uses that have an impact on daily lives. The AI statement also emphasizes promoting open source models. It is also interesting that China has ambitions to be a leader in the development of AI for the betterment of the human condition overall. That means China intends to drive AI development in far more areas than large language models (LLMs) which are currently taking centrestage in news around Western AI development.
The AI+ Initiative carries profound implications for the country’s transformation into a global leader in AI technology and is likely to drive the direction of China’s AI development for years to come.
Hong Kong is pivotal to the AI+ Initiative. We expect Hong Kong to be the centre of China’s AI fundraising and capital markets activities, as well as a significant part of China’s AI development efforts given Hong Kong’s pivot to a greater focus on science and technology. By leveraging its unique status as a global financial hub and an international gateway, the city is activating key projects such as the AI Supercomputing Centre, the HKIC-BAAI partnership and cross-boundary data flow mechanisms, to bolster China’s national mission while solidifying its own role as a premier AI and data hub for the Greater Bay Area and globally.
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