China's Supreme People's Court (SPC) has issued new guidelines clarifying who bears legal liability for AI deepfakes and voice cloning, in a September 7 move to establish guardrails around AI-generated content. The guidance gives lower courts nationwide a unified standard in an area where rulings had previously varied, and it aligns the judiciary with China's existing AI rules, including the 2023 generative AI regulations and the Civil Code's personality-rights provisions protecting a person's likeness and voice.

Artificial intelligence has advanced to the point where anyone can produce convincing digital doubles simply by scraping a few photos or short recordings from the internet or social media and spreading that content for financial gain or to push narratives.

China draws the line at consent

According to the SPC, the dividing line between legal and illegal AI content based on a person's replica is consent. Creating or sharing an AI recreation of someone's face or voice without that person's agreement constitutes an infringement of their rights.

The degree of infringement increases when the AI replica is used to spread false claims or run false narratives. Where the fake content becomes malicious to the point of false and defamatory sexual claims, victims can fast-track action by seeking an injunction rather than waiting through a lengthy court process.

AI providers whose tools are used to generate such content also face liability, particularly if they have received notice of potential rights violations connected to their platforms' capabilities. Liability still applies if the AI model was spreading false or inaccurate information due to AI hallucinations.

Notably, per local reports, actors such as Joey Wong and Lawrence Ng, as well as ordinary individuals, have begun issuing likeness rights to AI platforms, part of a growing market to formalize AI replication. More than 95% of the 128,000 microdramas released in China in the first quarter of 2026 reportedly used AI during production.

Who else faces liability for misusing AI?

The court also addressed fairness in business dealings within the same guidelines. For example, a business cannot use algorithms to charge different customers different rates without a reasonable basis for the price discrepancy. Firms caught engaging in the practice will now face liability for harm caused to affected buyers.

"We cannot expect every consumer to become an expert at spotting deception," Zhou Jiahai, who heads the SPC's research office, said in the Xinhua report. "The law must step in promptly to protect consumers' legitimate rights and interests."

How has China handled AI deepfake cases?

Before this guidance from the apex court, lower-court judges had to issue discretionary rulings case by case.

The Beijing Internet Court issued the city's first AI deepfake ruling in June 2024, fining an app operator 3,500 yuan (about $482) for allowing users to apply face-swap templates to generate content featuring two models without obtaining due consent.

Per the National Business Daily, the Guangzhou Internet Court has ruled on roughly 700 AI face-theft cases in just three years.

A regulatory push on several fronts

The SPC guidelines form one piece of a broader clampdown. On September 2, the Cyberspace Administration of China said it had removed more than 5.61 million pieces of harmful or illegal content and roughly 49,000 accounts across 2,400 sites and apps — including Douyin, Kuaishou, RedNote and WeChat — in a drive against AI "slop," fake news and impersonation, the South China Morning Post reported.

ByteDance has also taken down over 85,000 videos involving unauthorized AI reproductions of people's faces and voices since January.

Earlier campaigns targeted the same problem in commerce. In November 2025, Xinhua reported that authorities scrubbed more than 8,700 non-compliant items and dealt with over 11,000 accounts that used AI to mimic celebrities in shopping live streams, including forged clones of actress Wen Zhengrong and Olympic champions promoting everyday goods.

Since September 1, 2025, China's content-labeling rules have required AI-generated material to be marked, though enforcement has lagged as violators hide or strip the identifiers. How consistently courts apply the new liability framework — and whether platform takedown and labeling enforcement catch up — will indicate how much teeth the guidelines have in practice.