Shanghai embodied intelligence implementation plan

Background

Embodied intelligence (具身智能) is a term for AI systems that act through a physical body: instead of only producing text or images, the system has to read a scene, decide what to do and drive a machine to do it. Most of the work in this area is done with robots — arms on production lines, mobile machines in warehouses, and humanoid robots built to fit spaces and tools designed for people. Such systems depend on hardware suppliers, data from real environments and places where machines can be tested again and again, so the industry tends to cluster where those three things are available.

The plan released in August 2025

Shanghai released its Embodied Intelligence Industry Development Implementation Plan on 6 August 2025 ^[1]. The plan sets out a "three hundreds" goal: gather 100 key enterprises, land 100 major application scenarios and promote 100 internationally leading products ^[1]. It also targets a core industry scale of more than 50 billion yuan ^[1].

The three numbers point at different parts of the chain. Enterprises are the supply side; application scenarios are the places where a robot is put into a real production or service process; products are finished machines that can be compared with what is sold elsewhere. Putting the three side by side means the plan is aimed at the whole path from company to deployment to product, rather than at the output of a single link.

Two earlier plans

Shanghai issued the Shanghai Action Plan for High-Quality Innovation and Development of the Intelligent Robot Industry (2023-2025) in October 2023, aiming to build a globally influential robot industry innovation highland ^[2]. Earlier still, People's Daily reported that the city's 2022 action plan for high-quality development of the intelligent terminal industry aimed to cultivate a 10-billion-yuan intelligent robot industry by 2025 ^[2].

Read together, the documents show the numbers moving from a 10-billion-yuan intelligent robot industry to a core embodied intelligence industry of more than 50 billion yuan. The two figures cover different categories and are not directly comparable; the later document singles out embodied intelligence as a line of technology with targets of its own.

Institutions and open source

China Economic Net reported that the national-local jointly built Humanoid Robot Innovation Center landed in Shanghai in 2024 ^[3]. The center released Qinglong (青龙), described as the world's first full-size humanoid robot public reference design ^[3]. It also set up the OpenLoong open-source community and built China's first heterogeneous humanoid robot training ground ^[3].

A public reference design means the design is published so that other teams can modify it instead of starting from a blank page on structure and components. A heterogeneous training ground means robots of different makes and models collect data in one place, so what is gathered is not tied to a single body. For a field this young, both reduce duplicated work.

Targets, not results

The figures in the implementation plan are goals rather than outcomes: 100 enterprises, 100 scenarios, 100 products and a core industry of more than 50 billion yuan all have to be reached over the following period. For an industry that needs hardware, data and customers to line up at the same time, a government plan can set a direction and give firms a reason to gather in one place; whether the goals are met will show in the products companies ship and in how many places those products keep being used.