China's Eight Departments Set AI Plan for Industrial Foundation Innovation

China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) and seven other departments issued a plan to use artificial intelligence to support innovation in industrial foundations.

The plan calls for expanding development of general-purpose large models and models tailored to industrial fields. It also calls for integrating industrial mechanism models with intelligent-agent decision models. Separately, it backs intelligent-native foundational products and seeks to cultivate service formats such as model-as-a-service and agent-as-a-service.

The plan calls for AI deployment across product development, design simulation, pilot-scale validation and production operations. It says wider use should improve process management, analysis and forecasting, and decision execution, accelerating iteration in industrial foundation innovation.

A separate China AI and manufacturing plan set 2027 targets for embedding general-purpose models in manufacturing and developing industrial agents and datasets.