China five-year plan puts AI and open models at economic core

China is making AI a central pillar of its next development cycle, and the numbers are getting too big for anyone in the race to AGI to ignore. Declaring a 1.2 trillion yuan core AI industry and 6,200 companies is less about bragging rights and more about signaling to domestic officials and firms that AI is now a priority sector on par with semiconductors and high‑speed rail. The new five‑year plan’s “AI+” action program, with explicit calls for hyperscale compute clusters, open‑source AI communities, humanoid robots and brain–computer interfaces, gives Chinese labs and industry a long, politically backed runway.

For the broader race, this matters in two ways. First, it formalizes a state‑backed push into frontier‑adjacent areas like humanoid robotics and large‑scale agents, which are likely to be crucial testbeds for embodied and autonomous intelligence. Second, Beijing is clearly betting that open‑source AI can be a strategic differentiator against the US, leaning into its lead in open‑model downloads and trying to turn that into durable ecosystem advantage. Expect heavy subsidies for compute, talent and data infrastructure aimed at keeping domestic champions like DeepSeek well‑fed even as export controls bite.