AI Safety in the 15th Five-Year Plan — Two Sessions Special Edition
A close look at all 30 mentions of AI in the new Five-Year Plan and other updates from the Two Sessions
The “Two Sessions” — the annual convening of the National People’s Congress (NPC) and Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) — are a fixture of China’s political calendar. And 2026’s edition carries unusual weight. Alongside the standard annual work reports, this year’s Two Sessions published China’s 15th Five-Year Plan, setting the country’s overarching domestic policy agenda for 2026–2030.
In this special edition, we unpack what the Plan and other Two Session updates signal for AI safety and governance in China.
AI safety enters China’s Five-Year Plan for the first time
Background: China’s Five-Year Plans are among the country’s most authoritative policy documents. They set strategic priorities across every domain of economic and social development, and shape bureaucratic incentives, budget allocations, and regulatory agendas for years to come.
On AI development: Technology is a high-priority topic in the Five-Year Plan. Within that, AI has been clearly elevated compared to the 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-25), both in prominence and detail.
The 15th Plan is oriented around productive deployment of AI — a shift from the 14th Plan, where AI was treated primarily as a frontier scientific research field. The underlying logic will be familiar to anyone who followed last August’s “AI+” policy:
First, build the foundations — self-reliance in high-performance chips, compute infrastructure, foundational software, data resources, and algorithmic innovation.
Then, use AI to drive productivity gains across industries, from traditional sectors undergoing digital upgrading to more advanced applications like AI in science.
It also goes into unusual technical detail for a document of this type, naming specific priorities like “more efficient model training and inference methods,” multimodal AI, intelligent agents, and swarm intelligence.
The most novel addition is a call for “exploring pathways towards AGI development” — the first appearance of the term “AGI” in a major national-level policy document since a brief mention at a Politburo study session in 2023. The framing is deliberately cautious: “exploring pathways” implies neither a near-term timeline nor confidence in any single development trajectory. Also note that the Chinese term "通用人工智能" could be translated either as "artificial general intelligence" or "general artificial intelligence", and does not necessarily carry the same connotations as the English “AGI”.
Alongside this, the plan calls for “parallel development of general-purpose large models and industry-specific models,” further reinforcing that Beijing is not solely betting on scaling large models. Robotics and “embodied AI” receive substantial attention as well. Overall, the plan reflects openness to a diversity of AI technologies and development paradigms.
On AI safety and governance: The plan also contains substantive AI safety and governance content. While this is not entirely new (the 14th Plan included a brief reference to “accelerating AI safety technology innovation”), the safety and governance content this time appears across multiple sections with a surprising amount of detail.
Much of the content focuses on consolidating existing policy infrastructure: strengthening algorithm registration, security assessments, and improving laws and ethics guidelines for AI. The report also calls for promoting “full AI lifecycle risk management” with frameworks covering “safety monitoring, risk early warning, and emergency response” — language that closely mirrors Chinese President Xi Jinping’s remarks at an April 2025 Politburo study session on AI. This suggests policy interest in AI risk management and preparedness for AI-enabled emergencies is likely to remain high over the coming years.
That said, the plan largely stops short of naming specific risks. The only concrete examples given are “data abuse, deepfakes, and privacy breaches” — a narrow slice of the broader risk landscape.
AI’s impact on employment emerges as a distinct and prominent concern, appearing repeatedly across sections: the plan calls for monitoring AI’s labor market impact, strengthening job retention support, reskilling, and employment assistance, and bets on “job-creation effects of AI.” This follows an announcement earlier this year that China is developing a dedicated policy document on AI and employment. The Five-Year Plan language suggests this will be a running theme of the 2026–2030 period.
On international governance, there is no significant shift: the plan reaffirms China’s preference for broad multilateral frameworks and expresses support for Global South capacity building.
Implications: Compared to the 14th Five-Year Plan, the 15th plan reflects a meaningful elevation of AI’s status—both in its centrality as a driver of economic development and in the depth of its treatment of AI safety and governance.
That said, the plan does not represent a sharp break from China’s AI policy trajectory of 2024–25. On the development side, it largely reinforces the AI+ Initiative — many formulations appear nearly verbatim in last August’s document. The AGI reference is notable, but the careful and brief framing suggests Beijing’s focus is still on more near-term AI applications. On safety and governance, the content tracks closely with signals President Xi sent in 2025 and emphasizes general institutional mechanisms over specific risks, a sensible approach for a document intended to remain relevant across five years. Still, the volume of AI safety content is notable, given five-year plans are broad social and economic development documents first and foremost.
AI governance language enters the Government Work Report
Background: The Government Work Report, delivered annually by Premier LI Qiang (李强), reviews the prior year’s performance and sets priorities for the year ahead.
AI content: Attention to AI in the work report has grown steadily over recent years:
The 2024 edition included only a brief mention of AI innovation and the “AI+ Initiative”.
The 2025 report added references to more specific AI technologies, like large models, AI-enabled smartphones and computers, and embodied AI.
The 2026 report maintains most of the framing from last year’s report but introduces more specific language — such as a call to accelerate the adoption of AI agents. It also gives a direct shout-out to Chinese open-source models, with Premier Li stating that domestic large models are leading the global open-source ecosystem and pledging support for open-source community development in 2026. Notably, the report also explicitly calls for “improving AI governance” — the first time AI governance language has appeared in a government work report. Consistent with the Five-Year Plan, the report also addresses AI’s impact on employment.
Implications: Like the Five-Year Plan, this year’s Work Report largely signals continuity: a diffusion-centered framework anchored by the AI+ Initiative, with some forward-looking nods to emerging technological directions like agentic AI. The explicit inclusion of AI governance language is the most notable addition to prior years, and may signal that further AI regulation is on the horizon for 2026.
Other documents
Beyond the Five-Year Plan and the government work report, a range of other documents that touch on AI and AI governance were also published at the Two Sessions.
National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) Work Report
The NDRC serves as China’s macroeconomic planner, and is particularly relevant to AI through its oversight of compute infrastructure and data policy.
This year’s NDRC report calls for advancing AI-related legislation and “accelerating the construction of an AI safety risk prevention and control framework”, slightly more specific than last year's brief reference to “integrating safety and ethics into AI R&D and applications.”
National People’s Congress (NPC) Standing Committee Work Report
The NPC Standing Committee’s work report previews the legislature’s agenda for the year ahead.
The report calls for “strengthening legislative research” on AI. The language is substantively identical to last year’s, with one tiny difference: AI now gets its own standalone sentence rather than appearing in a longer list of emerging technology sectors.
The more meaningful signal will come from the NPC’s detailed legislative plans, expected to be released in the coming months. For now, the language does not suggest that a comprehensive AI Law is imminent. The more likely trajectory is continued incremental integration of AI-related provisions into existing legislation — a pattern already established last year when AI safety language was incorporated into revisions to the Cybersecurity Law.
Minister press conferences
The Two Sessions also feature brief press conferences by ministers. Many ministers touched on AI, though most simply restated content from the Five-Year Plan or Government Work Report.
Ministry of Justice Minister HE Rong (贺荣) pledged to “accelerate research and legislation” in the AI field.
Ministry of Science and Technology Minister YIN Hejun (阴和俊) briefly listed AI among frontier technologies requiring stronger research.
NDRC Minister ZHENG Shanjie (郑栅洁) reiterated key AI targets from the Five-Year Plan, citing a projection that AI-related industry output will exceed 10 trillion yuan by 2030.
Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) Minister LI Yuecheng (李乐成) singled out safety as a point to “especially emphasize,” noting that AI must be “used by, serve, and remain under the control of people.”
Delegate comments and proposals
The Two Sessions are also a platform for NPC and CPPCC delegates to put forward proposals and suggestions. AI-related proposals this year were numerous; some notable AI-safety-related ones include:
Three delegates raised alarms on AI’s impact on cybersecurity. CPPCC delegate Hou Hongyi (周鸿祎), founder of 360, warned of “hacker agents”. Fellow CPPCC delegate Qi Xiangdong (齐向东), chairman of Qi-Anxin, cautioned that as AI gains “superhuman” capabilities and permissions, it could escape human control and dramatically lower the barriers to cyberattack. NPC delegate Zong Qiang (宗强) of China Telecom added that AI-generated malicious code and real-time voice deepfakes are pushing fraud success rates close to 100%. All three called for using AI in cyber defence to counter these threats; Zong also proposed dedicated legislation.
Also notable is a lengthy People’s Daily piece by CPPCC Standing Committee member Miao Wei (苗圩), a former MIIT minister. He calls for stronger legal and ethical frameworks, a sandbox regulatory model for AI products, and a multi-department AI security emergency management mechanism including regular drills. He also highlights AI’s “cross-border characteristics,” calling for international cooperation on issues like cybercrime. A full unofficial English translation is available here.
Excellent breakdown of the 15th FYP's shift toward application and governance. The emphasis on leading rather than just participating in global economic governance suggests that China's internal safety standards may soon become the blueprint for international norms. Great work on synthesizing these complex policy signals.