中华人民共和国工业和信息化部. MIIT is the Chinese central-government ministry with responsibility for industrial policy, telecommunications, the information and communications industry, radio spectrum, and the software and internet-information sectors. In AI governance it operates as a co-issuer alongside the Cyberspace Administration of China rather than as the lead drafter, and as the primary planning authority for the physical layer — networks, computing infrastructure, and the domestic chip and equipment supply chain.
Role in the AI regulatory stack
MIIT is a named promulgator of the principal instruments in China's layered AI regime, which the CAC leads. It is one of three signatories, with the CAC and the National Development and Reform Commission, of the Implementation Opinions on the Standardized Application and Innovative Development of Intelligent Agents of May 8, 2026, and shares responsibility under Part VI of that instrument for supporting policies, a coordinated working mechanism, and an evaluation indicator system for agent development (China — Implementation Opinions on the Standardized Application and Innovative Development of Intelligent Agents). It co-issued the Deep Synthesis Provisions with the CAC and the Ministry of Public Security, and is one of six co-issuers of the Generative AI Interim Measures alongside the NDRC, the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Science and Technology, the Ministry of Public Security and the National Radio and Television Administration.
The Future of Life Institute's summer 2026 index annex places MIIT among the enforcement bodies for China's binding national instruments, alongside the CAC, the Ministry of Public Security and the State Administration for Market Regulation, with available consequences including fines up to 50 million RMB or 5 percent of turnover, service suspension, delisting and licence revocation (FLI AI Safety Index — Summer 2026 Edition (Future of Life Institute, July 2026)).
MIIT also operates sector-specific regimes that reach AI systems indirectly. Autonomous-driving deployment, including Baidu's Apollo, runs under MIIT and Ministry of Transport vehicle-testing rules rather than under the AI stack proper (Baidu (ERNIE)).
Information and communications industry planning
MIIT issues the sectoral five-year plan for the information and communications industry. The plan for 2026–2030, circular 工信部规〔2026〕188号, was signed August 12, 2026 and released September 7, 2026 through the Ministry's Department of Information and Communications Development. It sets thirteen headline indicators, among them intelligent computing scale rising from 1,590 EFLOPS in 2025 to 9,800 EFLOPS in 2030 and advanced storage capacity rising from 540 EB to 1,700 EB, and directs "orderly deployment of ten-thousand-card, hundred-thousand-card and above intelligent computing clusters" together with "greatly increased adaptation to domestically produced computing chips" (MIIT — Information and Communications Industry Development 15th Five-Year Plan (Gong Xin Bu Gui [2026] No. 188)).
The same plan contains the Ministry's agent-governance programme. Its column 5 directs construction of an "internet agent identity identification system" built on an upgraded domain-name system, with agent registration management, identity authentication, ownership determination and address resolution capabilities, international nodes interoperable with "mainstream international technical systems," and monitoring, early-warning and security-control capability "over the full lifecycle of agents." Task 10 commits the Ministry to establishing management systems for intelligent information services and the agent internet, and to deepening AI-assisted approval in telecom market access. Named research priorities include deep-synthesis forgery detection, training-data protection and agent security; column 12 provides for an anti-fraud vertical large model under an "AI + anti-fraud" project (MIIT — Information and Communications Industry Development 15th Five-Year Plan (Gong Xin Bu Gui [2026] No. 188)).
Cybersecurity notification
On July 8, 2026 a cybersecurity threat platform operated by MIIT issued a "backdoor" security alert concerning Anthropic's Claude Code, days after Alibaba banned the tool internally over alleged backdoor risks (Source: reuters.com). The alert followed Anthropic's June 2026 restriction of model access affecting Chinese entities; see Export Controls (AI).
Chip-procurement approvals
MIIT's role extends to approving domestic firms' purchases of foreign AI accelerators. According to two people familiar with the matter, in an account that became public on September 27, 2026, the ministry asked companies including Alibaba Group and ByteDance, ahead of Xi Jinping's September visit to Washington, to report how many of Nvidia's RTX Pro 5500 chips they want and for what use, and told some companies the government intends to approve the purchases; the timing, quantities and standard for approval were unclear (Source: theinformation.com). See Nvidia & TSMC — AI Compute Infrastructure, US-China AI Competition: Different Races, Different Metrics.
Relationships
- related: Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) — lead regulator of the AI stack MIIT co-issues.
- related: Chinese AI Policy — the regime this ministry helps administer.
- depends-on: MIIT — Information and Communications Industry Development 15th Five-Year Plan (Gong Xin Bu Gui [2026] No. 188) — the Ministry's current sectoral plan.
- related: China — Implementation Opinions on the Standardized Application and Innovative Development of Intelligent Agents, China — Provisions on the Administration of Deep Synthesis Internet Information Services, China — Interim Measures for the Management of Generative AI Services — instruments MIIT co-issued.
- related: US-China AI Competition: Different Races, Different Metrics — the compute and self-sufficiency targets MIIT sets feed the comparison there.