PLA Daily Says AI Cannot Replace Battlefield Commanders

The stance sits alongside China's broader military modernization program around "intelligentization," a term used for the integration of AI-enabled systems into military capabilities. In a January 2025 Joint Force Quarterly study, Japan Ground Self-Defense Force Colonel Koichiro Takagi wrote that intelligentization has been a focus of PLA reform and that Xi Jinping referred to it three times at the Chinese Communist Party's 20th National Congress in 2022.

Takagi's study examined PLA Daily military-theory articles to assess how Chinese military writers describe AI's potential and limitations. It notes an external debate over whether PLA theorists overestimate AI and autonomous systems, particularly given their vulnerabilities. The study also examines whether the PLA is aware of those vulnerabilities while continuing to pursue AI-focused military reforms.

The available reporting does not specify particular models, weapons platforms or command-and-control deployments. It does, however, identify a functional division: AI supports information processing and options generation, while humans retain authority over strategy and final action.

For practitioners working on high-consequence decision systems, comparable human-in-the-loop designs raise concrete engineering questions: whether model recommendations can be audited, how operators detect degraded inputs or adversarial manipulation, and whether an escalation path exists when model confidence and human judgment diverge. These are general deployment challenges, not evidence of the PLA's internal implementation.

What is publicly documented is the PLA Daily's January 2025 position that AI can support command effectiveness but should not displace commanders' final decision authority.