In order to promote the research and application transformation of anti-infrared smoke screen materials, the research status, main problems and development trend of the materials were systematically analyzed from the material development and research on extinction performance. The results show that the research of carbon black and red phosphorus based hot smoke materials mainly focus on the improvement of the formula. The cold smoke materials, such as layered super-molecular, ultrafine ceramic powder, nano powder and biomaterials, have made remarkable achievements in structural design and synthesis technology. At present, there are some problems in the research, such as the lack of environment-friendly anti-infrared smoke screen materials, the difficulty of extinction theory innovation and so on. In the future, low cost-effectiveness ratio and environment-friendly anti-infrared smoke materials will become the development focus in this field.