The China National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA) has officially released its comprehensive 15th Five-Year Plan for Patent and Trademark Examination, charting a transformative course for intellectual property governance through the end of the decade. Published in late 2026, the strategic roadmap establishes an ambitious target to build a world-class, globally leading IP examination institution by 2030. Grounded in the broader national directives of the Outline for Building a Powerful Intellectual Property Nation (2021–2035), the plan mandates sweeping institutional reforms, aggressive technological modernization driven by artificial intelligence, and deeper structural alignment with international high-standard trade agreements. By intertwining patent and trademark examination policies with national industrial strategies, CNIPA aims to recalibrate how intellectual property rights are granted, managed, and enforced across the world’s second-largest economy.
Strategic Framework and Core Principles
At the heart of the 15th Five-Year Plan are five guiding principles designed to overhaul CNIPA’s operational ethos: prioritizing examination quality, pursuing aggressive institutional reform and innovation, aligning examination frameworks directly with industrial development, coordinating patent and trademark systems symmetrically, and embedding artificial intelligence across every phase of the examination workflow.
The strategy arrives at a critical juncture for China’s innovation ecosystem. Over the past decade, CNIPA has experienced exponential growth in application volumes, making it the world’s busiest intellectual property office. However, sheer volume has historically created pressures regarding the depth of examination and the prevalence of speculative filings. The new plan directly addresses these systemic challenges by coupling quality control with procedural efficiency. According to institutional guidelines, CNIPA intends to maintain invention patent examination pendency at levels that lead among major global patent offices—including the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and the European Patent Office (EPO)—while simultaneously purging low-quality, bad-faith applications from the pipeline.
Modernizing Patent Examination for the AI Era and International Trade
The plan outlines a multi-pronged overhaul of the patent examination legal system, mandating continuous research into revisions of the Patent Law, its implementing regulations, and the Patent Examination Guidelines. Crucially, these legislative and regulatory studies are explicitly tailored to align China’s domestic IP environment with international high-standard economic and trade rules. Particular emphasis is placed on studying provisions found within the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), a major multilateral free-trade pact encompassing eleven Pacific Rim economies. Areas targeted for legal alignment include patent priority systems, novelty grace periods, and deferred examination procedures.
Emerging technologies command a dedicated section of the modernization agenda. CNIPA has established specialized rules projects to tackle the unprecedented legal questions posed by artificial intelligence, big data, gene technology, biobreeding, green low-carbon technology, and traditional Chinese medicine.
For AI-assisted and AI-generated inventions, the plan poses foundational regulatory questions that examiners must grapple with: How should the legal concept of a "person skilled in the art" be defined in the context of machine-assisted creation? What is the appropriate scope of prior art? How should inventorship and patentability be attributed when an algorithm plays a primary role in creation? Furthermore, the plan initiates studies on whether to mandate formal disclosure requirements regarding AI utilization in patent applications. Parallel updates are slated for standard-essential patents (SEPs), virtual and augmented reality design protections, and graphical user interface (GUI) submission standards.
Revolutionizing Management and Quality Control Through AI+ Mechanisms
To manage mounting complexity, CNIPA is deploying an "AI+" operational framework designed to transform internal business management. The plan calls for reinforcing vertical feedback loops—specifically strengthening the business guidance and quality feedback originating from post-grant procedures, such as reexamination and invalidation boards, back down to first-instance examiners.
In an effort to streamline the initial examination phase, CNIPA will research the feasibility of providing pre-search reports for invention patent applications, a procedural shift intended to optimize workflow and reduce subsequent friction. Furthermore, the agency is tackling the perennial issue of application quality at its source. Good-faith filing principles will be strictly enforced through automated data-sharing mechanisms, heightened scrutiny of commercialization prospects via pre-filing evaluation systems, and severe penalties for entities and agencies that engage in abusive or speculative filing behaviors.
Trademark Governance and Geographical Indication Reform
On the trademark front, the plan operationalizes the implementation of recently revised trademark laws and implementing regulations. Trademark examination procedures are set for a major digital upgrade through a pilot "AI plus big data" examination model, alongside expansions of fast-track processing and applicant-requested deferred examinations.
Systemic governance targeting bad-faith trademark registrations is a cornerstone of the new policy. CNIPA will employ penetrating supervision techniques to identify the actual corporate and individual entities behind malicious filings, utilizing business registration data to cross-reference abnormalities. Trademark agencies that knowingly represent bad-faith applicants will face strict list-based monitoring and disciplinary measures.
Additionally, the plan mandates rigorous oversight for collective and certification trademarks tied to geographical indications (GIs). Examiners are instructed to verify historical records strictly, standardize GI nomenclature and protected geographic demarcations, and ensure seamless coordination between trademark registrations and product-specific GI standards.
Deepening Global Cooperation and Multilateral Engagement
International cooperation remains a vital pillar of CNIPA’s long-term strategy. The plan commits the agency to active participation in global governance frameworks administered by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), particularly concerning emerging international norms for artificial intelligence in intellectual property.
CNIPA will continue its active leadership within the IP5 framework—the collaborative body comprising the five largest patent offices globally (CNIPA, USPTO, EPO, Japan Patent Office, and Korean Intellectual Property Office)—as well as deepening cooperation through the BRICS grouping and Belt and Road Initiative partnerships. To assist domestic innovators navigating global markets, CNIPA aims to expand the Patent Prosecution Highway (PPH) network, enhance public training on overseas patent and trademark positioning, and streamline access to international filing systems like the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) and the Madrid System.
Workforce Development and Institutional Safeguards
Recognizing that advanced technological infrastructure requires a highly skilled human workforce, the final provisions of the 15th Five-Year Plan emphasize talent acquisition and institutional safeguards. CNIPA will institute tiered and categorized training programs, establishing a specialized AI technology and applications training curriculum for examiners.
Institutional safeguards focus heavily on cybersecurity, data sovereignty, and risk mitigation. As CNIPA rolls out multimodal large models across all stages of examination, the agency has pledged to fortify its data security infrastructure, build robust disaster-recovery capabilities, and establish systematic risk prevention mechanisms for existing trademark registries. Through these comprehensive measures, CNIPA’s 15th Five-Year Plan establishes a rigorous, future-proof blueprint designed to cement China’s status as an intellectual property powerhouse through the close of the decade.
