In order to reduce the effect of nonlinear friction and time-varying factors on the servo system of a computer numerical control (CNC) machine tool and improve its motion control accuracy, this paper uses an adaptive sliding mode control (ASMC) method based on model reference adaptive control (MRAC). The method adopts ASMC in the control outer loop and obtains the optimal control parameters by making the sliding mode control (SMC) law continuous and adaptively estimating the control parameters. At the same time, MRAC is used in the control inner loop to enhance the “invariance” of the controlled object so that the switching gain of SMC can satisfy the disturbance matching condition even under lesser conditions. Simulation and experimental results show that compared with the traditional SMC, the ASMC based on MRAC proposed in this paper effectively reduces the influence of nonlinear friction on the system performance, and the reduction in following error reaches 71.2%, which significantly improves the motion control accuracy of the control system. The spectral analysis of the following errors shows that the maximum magnitude reduction rate of the high-frequency chattering is 89.02%, which significantly reduces the effect of the high-frequency chattering and effectively improves the stability performance of the control system.