The General Offices of the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee and the State Council issued the “Opinions on Promoting the Deep Integration of Technological Innovation and Industrial Innovation” (关于推动科技创新和产业创新深度融合的意见) on October 21, 2026, as reported by Xinhua and others. The Opinions address intellectual property reform within China’s broader strategy to convert scientific research into industrial capability, with artificial intelligence named as a priority application domain.
Section 15 of the Opinions addresses IP protection, utilization, and standards-setting directly. It calls for establishing mechanisms to share benefits and risks in industry-university-research (产学研) collaboration and in the commercialization of scientific and technological achievements (科技成果转化), signaling a shift away from one-sided licensing or assignment arrangements toward structures where universities, research institutes, and enterprises jointly bear commercialization risk and share resulting returns. It also commits to comprehensive nationwide rollout of the open patent licensing system (专利开放许可制度), building on pilot programs CNIPA has run since 2021, intended to lower transaction costs for SMEs seeking access to patented technology and to increase utilization rates of patents held by universities and public research institutes. In addition, the document directs agencies funding flagship national technology programs to build systematic patent portfolios proactively through patent layout in major national S&T projects (国家重大科技项目专利布局), rather than relying on ad hoc filings after research concludes, an approach aimed at securing freedom-to-operate and standard-essential positions before competitors do. The same section calls for strengthened protection of trade secrets and IP in “new business forms and new fields” (新业态新领域), language that in recent regulatory practice has been applied to data, algorithms, and platform-based business models, relevant to AI developers whose core value often resides in training methodologies and model architectures that fall outside conventional patent or copyright protection.
Beyond section 15, section 3 sets out structural measures relevant to IP practitioners, including deepening the rights allocation/vesting for job-related (service) scientific and technological achievements (职务科技成果赋权) reform, which vests rights to service inventions with inventors or research units rather than solely the state, encouraging universities to license technology to small and micro enterprises on a “use first, pay later” basis, and supporting the establishment of technology transfer offices and professional technology brokers.
Artificial intelligence receives explicit attention in section 6, which lists AI alongside quantum technology, embodied intelligence (具身智能), brain-computer interfaces, and 6G as frontier technologies where China intends to pursue diversified technical routes and commercialize emerging applications. Separately, section 7 calls for a comprehensive “AI+” initiative (全面实施”人工智能+”行动) to apply AI across industrial sectors. Read together with the IP provisions, this suggests the drafters anticipate a wave of AI-related patent filings and standards activity, paired with heightened attention to trade secret protection for the training data, model weights, and algorithmic know-how that often underlie AI products but resist conventional patent claiming.
The document itself does not state its own legal effect; as a matter of Chinese administrative practice, documents in the “意见” (Opinions) category are generally understood to convey policy direction and strategic priorities without the directly binding, enforceable force of a law (法), regulation (条例), or measure (办法). On that basis, the Opinions should be read as a statement of policy direction rather than an amendment to the Patent Law or related regulations. They nonetheless point to likely regulatory follow-through in expanded open licensing infrastructure, revised rules on service-invention ownership and compensation, and sharpened guidance on trade-secret protection for AI-related technical information.
The full text as reported by China’s Supreme People’s Court is available here (Chinese only). Section 15 regarding intellectual property is reproduced below in English.
(XV) Strengthen the protection, utilization, and technical standards development of intellectual property rights. Enhance the protection of trade secrets and intellectual property rights in new business models and emerging fields, and improve the mechanisms for benefit sharing and risk sharing in industry-academia-research cooperation and the transformation of scientific and technological achievements. Fully implement the open patent licensing system. Strengthen the patent layout for major national science and technology projects. Strengthen the standard layout for major national science and technology projects, and coordinate the setting of standard research tasks and assessment targets. Comprehensively strengthen the development of national and international standards and pre-standard research in cutting-edge fields. Promote the improvement of the quality and efficiency of enterprise standards and group standards.
