Introduction
In late August 2025, China's State Council published a document that will shape the country's technology policy for a decade: the Opinions on Deepening the Implementation of the "AI Plus" Initiative (国发〔2025〕11号). A year later it remains the single most important piece of framing for anyone trying to understand where Chinese artificial intelligence is heading — not because it funds specific projects, but because it sets the targets and the categories that everything else now plugs into.
For foreign readers, the plan is worth reading for a simple reason: it reveals what the Chinese state believes AI is for. The answer is not chatbots. It is productivity, industry, and governance — applied, industrial, and spread across the whole economy. Here is what the document says, what has happened since, and what to watch.
What the Plan Is
The "AI Plus" initiative is the intellectual successor to earlier broadband, internet, and digital-economy strategies. The idea is familiar from its predecessors: take a general-purpose technology and push it into every sector, deliberately and at scale. If "Internet Plus" was about connecting commerce, "AI Plus" is about embedding intelligence into production and public services.
The full text is available in the official policy library of the Chinese government's central portal, and English-language analysis of its significance was carried by outlets such as China Daily when it was released.
The concept itself is not new. "AI Plus" first appeared in the Government Work Report in 2024, was elevated at the December 2024 Central Economic Work Conference, and was reaffirmed in the 2025 Government Work Report before the State Council's executive meeting approved the dedicated opinion in July 2025. The August publication was the moment the slogan became a formal plan with dates.
The Six Priority Actions
The document organizes nearly everything around six "AI Plus" actions:
- Science and technology — accelerating scientific discovery through AI and building large scientific models.
- Industrial development — embedding AI across manufacturing, agriculture, and services, including AI-native business models.
- Consumption upgrading — new service-consumption scenarios and intelligent consumer products.
- People's wellbeing — smarter ways to work, learn, and live, including AI in healthcare and insurance services.
- Governance capacity — human-machine collaboration in public administration and social governance.
- Global cooperation — promoting AI as a shared international public good and helping shape global AI governance.
The Targets: 2027, 2030, 2035
The plan's headline numbers are its three-phase roadmap, and they are the part most widely quoted:
- By 2027: widespread, deep integration of AI across the six key sectors, with the penetration rate of new-generation intelligent terminals and AI agents exceeding 70 percent.
- By 2030: AI empowering high-quality development across the board, with penetration of next-generation terminals and agents exceeding 90 percent, and the "intelligent economy" becoming a major growth pole.
- By 2035: China entering, in the document's phrasing, a new stage of intelligent economy and intelligent society.
Note what these targets actually measure. They are about adoption — how many devices and AI agents are in use — rather than about model benchmarks. That is a deliberate choice, and it tells you the state's priority is deployment, not prestige.
The Eight Supporting Capabilities
Under the six actions sit eight foundational capabilities, which is where the industrial policy really lives:
- stronger foundation models
- better data supply and innovation
- coordinated intelligent computing power
- an improved application environment
- a thriving open-source ecosystem
- talent development
- policy and legal safeguards
- security capacity
This structure matters because it is a checklist for provincial and municipal governments. When a local government drafts its own AI plan, it now has six domains and eight capabilities to tick off — which is how a central document becomes thousands of local projects.
What Has Changed Since
A year is too short to judge a 2035 plan, but several things are observable.
First, the plan consolidated the vocabulary. "AI Plus" is now the standard frame in government documents, replacing a scatter of earlier terms. That alone shapes where money and attention flow.
Second, the emphasis on embodied intelligence and intelligent terminals — smart vehicles, robots, AI phones and computers, wearables, smart homes — has pushed hardware to the center of the AI story. China's strength in manufacturing gives it a genuine comparative advantage in putting models into physical products.
Third, the plan explicitly links AI adoption to governance and public services, from assisted diagnosis to municipal infrastructure upgrades. That is a signal to state-owned enterprises and health systems that they are expected to become early, large-scale customers.
Fourth, the security and governance track has kept pace. The document pairs rapid deployment with an insistence on "safe and controllable" systems and the development of AI governance rules, reflecting the balancing act that runs through Chinese tech policy.
What to Watch Next
- Real adoption numbers. The 70 percent and 90 percent figures are testable. Watch for official statistics on intelligent-terminal and AI-agent penetration.
- Provincial plans. The clearest sign of genuine implementation is whether provincial and municipal governments publish their own AI Plus roadmaps with budgets attached.
- The hardware race. Whether Chinese AI companies can convert model capability into exportable consumer hardware is the biggest commercial question.
- Cross-border effects. The global-cooperation clause is aspirational; the harder question is how China's AI products travel, and how other countries' rules treat them.
- The 15th Five-Year Plan. With the 2026–2030 planning cycle now underway, watch how the AI Plus targets are folded into the country's top-level economic blueprint.