<p>The development of scientific thinking is one of the core goals of physics education in the age of intelligence. Recently, generative AI has shown full potential for application in education, and how it can be used for scientific thinking development deserves further investigation. Therefore, this paper proposes the teaching model for cultivating scientific thinking in physics based on intelligent technology (IT-CSTP), which integrates three intelligent technology tools, digital laboratory, online teaching platform, and generative AI-based chatbot, to cultivate high school student’s scientific reasoning and scientific argumentation (SRSA), modeling (MD), and questioning and creativity (QC). Using a quasi-experimental approach, two high school classes of students from China were divided into an experimental class (<i>N</i> = 40) and a control class (<i>N</i> = 40). IT-CSTP was used for the experimental class, and traditional physics teaching (TP) was used for the control class. The results showed that the experimental class had higher levels of SRSA, MD, and QC than the control class. This proves the effectiveness of IT-CSTP for cultivating scientific thinking. However, there are some limitations with the use of IT-CSTP, and this study concludes with recommendations for improvement. Overall, this study re-validates the effectiveness of the application of intelligent technology for scientific thinking cultivation and, specifically, provides an effective practical path for using generative AI in physics classes, which provides some references for physics teaching.</p>