Abstract Introduction: Using panel data for 282 Chinese cities from 2011 to 2023, this study examines whether AIoriented place-based policy promotes urban green development. Methods: We exploit the staggered rollout of China’s National New Generation Artificial Intelligence Innovation and Development Pilot Zones (AIIDPZ) as a quasi-natural experiment and estimate its causal effect on urban green total factor productivity (GTFP) using a staggered difference-in-differences approach. Results: The results show that AIIDPZ significantly improves urban GTFP. Mechanism analyses suggest that this effect mainly operates through industrial structure upgrading and green technological innovation. Heterogeneity tests further show that the effect is stronger in eastern cities, non-resource-based cities, and cities with better digital infrastructure. Discussion: Overall, this study provides new evidence that AI-oriented public policy can contribute to green development and offers implications for the design of regional innovation policy. 1 Introduction Climate change is reshaping development strategies, industrial competition, and public policy around the world. For China, this challenge is especially pressing. As the world’s largest developing economy and a major manufacturing center, China must continue to grow while reducing carbon emissions and resource dependence. Its goals of peaking carbon emissions before 2030 and achieving carbon neutrality before 2060 make this transition even more urgent. Future growth can no longer rely mainly on factor-intensive expansion. Instead, it will depend more on technological progress, efficiency gains, and structural transformation. In this context, identifying new drivers of green development has become an important academic and policy issue. Recent discussions of climate governance and sustainable development likewise emphasize the urgency of reconciling economic growth with environmental sustainability (; ). Green total factor productivity (GTFP) provides a useful way to assess whether economic growth is becoming both more efficient and more environmentally sustainable. Unlike conventional productivity measures, GTFP considers not only factor inputs and desirable outputs, but