Chaos control can be applied in the vast areas of physics and engineering systems, but the parameters of chaotic system are inevitably perturbed by external inartificial factors and cannot be exactly known. This paper proposes an adaptive neural complementary sliding-mode control (ANCSC) system, which is composed of a neural controller and a robust compensator, for a chaotic system. The neural controller uses a functional-linked wavelet neural network (FWNN) to approximate an ideal complementary sliding-mode controller. Since the output weights of FWNN are equipped with a functional-linked type form, the FWNN offers good learning accuracy. The robust compensator is designed to eliminate the effect of the approximation error introduced by the neural controller upon the system stability in the Lyapunov sense. Without requiring preliminary offline learning, the parameter learning algorithm can online tune the controller parameters of the proposed ANCSC system to ensure system stable. Finally, it shows by the simulation results that favorable control performance can be achieved for a chaotic system by the proposed ANCSC scheme