Abstract In this paper, we investigate the optimal control of a semi-linear fractional PDEs involving the spectral diffusion operator, or the realization of the integral fractional Laplace operator with the zero Dirichlet exterior condition, both of order s with $$s\in (0,1)$$ s ∈ ( 0 , 1 ) . The state equation contains a non-smooth nonlinearity, and the objective functional is convex in the control variable but contains non-smooth terms. As the mappings involved may not be Gâteaux differentiable, we use a regularization technique to regularize these nonlinear terms, aiming to obtain Gâteaux differentiable mappings. By employing this regularization technique, we are able to derive the first-order optimality condition for the regularized control problem by using the associated adjoint system. Furthermore, we conduct a limit analysis on the regularized term resulting in an optimality system for the non-smooth problem of C-stationary type. Subsequently, we establish a primal optimality condition, specifically B-stationarity. Under the assumption of “constraint qualification”, we derive the strong stationarity conditions for the non-smooth optimization problem with control constraints and establish the equivalence between B-stationarity and strong stationarity conditions.