New quality productive forces represent a pioneering pathway of advanced high-quality development. Driven by technological innovation, the productive forces embody the productive capacity arising from critical and disruptive technological breakthroughs and serve as a vital means for achieving high-quality development. Recently, artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a transformative technology reshaping economic and social operations, as well as driving productivity leaps, assuming an increasingly prominent role in international competition and national development. As an institutional framework, AI policy holds substantial potential to guide and promote AI-enabled development of new quality productive forces. However, the mechanisms through which AI policy empowers new quality productive forces, as well as the contingent conditions governing this empowerment effect, remain under-researched through systematic empirical analysis. Existing evidence on this relationship has relied predominantly on theoretical discussions, while the limited quantitative literature focuses primarily on the firm level, leaving a gap in city-level empirical analysis. Given that cities serve as critical hubs for innovation clustering and industrial transformation, such analysis carries greater policy relevance. Furthermore, prior studies have emphasized the technology itself rather than policy effects. Drawing on an analytical framework encompassing technological innovation, production-factor allocation, and industrial upgrading, this study exploits the gradual implementation of China’s National New Generation Artificial Intelligence Innovation and Development Pilot Zones since 2019 as a quasi-experiment to quantitatively examine the impact of AI policy on multiple dimensions of new quality productive forces, including new workers, new means of production, new objects of labor, new technologies, new production organization, and new data factors. Results from a staggered difference-in-differences (DiD) estimation indicate that AI policy has increased new quality productive forces by at least 5.84%. Mechanism analysis reveals that the policy enhances new quality productive forces through stimulating technological innovation, optimizing production-factor allocation, and catalyzing industrial upgrading. Heterogeneity tests further indicate that the policy’s effect on new quality productive forces is more pronounced in cities with higher marketization levels and stronger technological capacity. This study offers insights into how AI policy can enhance high-quality development and foster the advancement of new quality productive forces. Sustained, AI policy-driven progress in new quality productive forces requires prioritizing technological innovation as the core driver, optimizing production-factor allocation as a supporting pillar, and advancing industrial upgrading as the implementation pathway, while concurrently improving cities’ marketization levels and technological capacity. Policy implementation should first establish a multi-tiered innovation ecosystem, such as creating an integrated support mechanism spanning basic research, applied research and commercialization. Second, efforts should continue toward building a unified national market for data factors, promoting institutional innovation in data ownership confirmation, circulation, trading, and regulation. Third, policies should foster coordinated development between traditional and emerging industries—on one hand, advancing the intelligent transformation of traditional industries, and on the other, cultivating strategic emerging industries and promoting the development of new AI-driven models. Finally, AI policy should enhance targeting precision and equity through guiding market entry cities with lower levels of marketization while reducing algorithm adoption barriers in technologically disadvantaged areas via national big data hub clusters and cross-regional scheduling networks.