Icing and snow accumulation are common in our daily life and industry. However, severe ice accretion on the surface of engineering equipment will seriously affect the service performance and often lead to high energy consumption or disastrous accidents when in extreme low-temperature environments. Traditional deicing technologies, such as mechanical deicing, heating deicing and spraying of chemical reagents, etc., are always inefficient, expensive and high operational risk, which cannot fundamentally solve the problem of ice accretion in practical engineering. Hence, the major research content is focused on solving the icing problem from the source by inhibiting or delaying the formation of icing on the surface, and reducing the adhesion strength of the surface ice layer and the amount of icing through the usage of functional anti-icing materials. Compared with traditional physical and chemical methods, this method is high efficiency, low energy consumption, simplicity and ease of operation, which has become one of the most promising approaches in the field of anti-icing technology. Based on this, this paper reviews the research progress of anti-icing materials in extreme low temperature environments at home and abroad on the basis of elaborating the surface and interface wetting characteristics and anti-icing mechanism of materials. The applicability, advantages and disadvantages of several main anti-icing materials such as solid-liquid interface, liquid-liquid interfaces and composite coating materials are compared and analyzed. The technical bottlenecks of the application of anti-icing materials at present are pointed out, and the future development direction and trend of anti-icing materials are prospected, with the hope of providing a reference for the design and selection of anti-icing materials in extreme low temperature environments.