Abstract: With the rapid development of urbanization and the increase of high-rise buildings, traditional fire-retardant materials are unable to meet the fire safety needs, additional fire warning system is required. However, today’s dominate commercial fire warning system is separated from building materials and thus need a long time to activate the alarm system, which wastes the best time for firefighting and evacuation. The key to realize super early fire warning is closely integrating the fire warning system and the matrix. Intelligent coating is a kind of artificial coating system that selectively provides the best response to external stimulus. By introducing intelligent coating into the traditional building fields, giving different kinds of materials flame retardant coating with fire-warning capabilities could make them actively respond to the external “fire” in the usage process, which would greatly improve the reliability of buildings, safety of life and their property safety as well. This paper summarizes and discusses the fire response mechanism, construction strategy and current research progress of flame retardant coating with fire-warning capabilities in recent years, and prospects future development and applications of this field.