China Releases "AI + Education" Action Plan

Recently, China's Ministry of Education, together with four other departments, issued the "AI + Education" Action Plan. The plan encourages higher education institutions, enterprises, and research institutes to participate in building the "AI + Education" ecosystem. It also calls for guiding state-owned and private long-term capital, patient capital, and strategic capital toward investment in educational technology innovation, thereby enabling more advanced technologies to serve human development.

The highlights of this action plan are as follows:

• Achieving full-stage coverage of AI education. For example, in the higher education stage, efforts will be made to establish artificial intelligence as a public foundational course, promote cross-disciplinary AI innovation, and optimize and adjust the setting of academic disciplines and majors to meet the new demands for talent in the intelligent era.
• Promoting AI application across all scenarios. For instance, in scientific research, with a focus on fields such as natural sciences, engineering sciences, and philosophy and social sciences, the plan envisions building scientific AI agents and intelligent experimental clusters to explore paradigm shifts in AI-driven research.
• Providing comprehensive safeguards for the AI environment. At the foundational level, the state will lead the construction of an educational intelligent computing service platform, organize a national corpus of educational and research data, and develop specialized large models for education, thereby providing schools at all levels with high-quality computing power support, data services, model capabilities, and intelligent tools.
• Driving full-factor innovation in AI mechanisms. In research and innovation, for instance, the plan promotes interdisciplinary integration of education with psychology, brain science, and other fields, and establishes a collaborative innovation mechanism involving government, industry, academia, research, and finance to jointly cultivate high-quality educational intelligence products.

To implement this action plan, China will increase investment and work with the National Development and Reform Commission to allocate central budgetary funds and "dual emphasis" funds for projects such as a national educational intelligent computing service platform, pilot test bases for AI (education) applications, and cross-disciplinary innovation platforms for AI disciplines, thereby strengthening the development foundation.