An application control method and a mobile terminal are provided. The method is applicable to a mobile terminal including a processor and an artificial intelligence (AI) module. Whether a current user is a registered user is detected by the processor when detecting that an application running on the mobile terminal belongs to a preset application set. A monitoring instruction carrying an identification of the running application is sent to the AI module by the processor when detecting that the current user is the registered user. A monitoring strategy of the running application associated with the registered user is acquired by the AI module, where the monitoring strategy includes a monitoring parameter and a corresponding monitoring parameter threshold. The running application is closed by the AI module when detecting that a value of the monitoring parameter of the running application is greater than or equal to the monitoring parameter threshold.