Recently, the Supreme People’s Court issued the Opinions on Lawfully Hearing Cases Involving Artificial Intelligence Disputes (hereinafter referred to as the Opinions).
This is the first judicial adjudication rules document involving artificial intelligence issued by the highest judicial organ of the State.
The Opinions consist of 5 parts and 24 articles, focusing on issues of social concern such as AI face-swapping and voice simulation and AI hallucination infringement, online doxxing, big data price discrimination against existing customers, autonomous driving, and model training, clarifies relevant substantive adjudication and litigation procedure rules.
In terms of protecting personality rights and interests, the Opinions provide: using AI to process a natural person’s name, portrait, etc. without consent, and generating a virtual digital image identifiable as that natural person and using or publicly disclosing it, constitutes infringement of personality rights and interests such as the right to name and the right to portrait; using a natural person’s voice as training corpus without consent, and imitating their timbre, intonation, and pronunciation style to generate an identifiable synthetic human voice, constitutes infringement of voice rights and interests; manipulating a virtual image or synthetic voice to carry out improper acts or make false statements and lower others’ social evaluation constitutes infringement of the right to reputation.
Where AI technology is used to produce or use a deceased person’s virtual digital image without authorization, causing infringement of the deceased person’s name, portrait, reputation, etc., the close relatives of the deceased may request the actor to bear civil liability in accordancewith the Civil Code, and the people’s court shall support this according to law. (September 7, 2026 China Daily)
This is the first judicial adjudication rules document involving artificial intelligence issued by the highest judicial organ of the State.
The Opinions consist of 5 parts and 24 articles, focusing on issues of social concern such as AI face-swapping and voice simulation and AI hallucination infringement, online doxxing, big data price discrimination against existing customers, autonomous driving, and model training, clarifies relevant substantive adjudication and litigation procedure rules.
In terms of protecting personality rights and interests, the Opinions provide: using AI to process a natural person’s name, portrait, etc. without consent, and generating a virtual digital image identifiable as that natural person and using or publicly disclosing it, constitutes infringement of personality rights and interests such as the right to name and the right to portrait; using a natural person’s voice as training corpus without consent, and imitating their timbre, intonation, and pronunciation style to generate an identifiable synthetic human voice, constitutes infringement of voice rights and interests; manipulating a virtual image or synthetic voice to carry out improper acts or make false statements and lower others’ social evaluation constitutes infringement of the right to reputation.
Where AI technology is used to produce or use a deceased person’s virtual digital image without authorization, causing infringement of the deceased person’s name, portrait, reputation, etc., the close relatives of the deceased may request the actor to bear civil liability in accordancewith the Civil Code, and the people’s court shall support this according to law. (September 7, 2026 China Daily)