China's Supreme Court Issues Nationwide Judicial Guidance on AI Disputes, Setting Rules on Deepfakes and Liability

Overview

China’s Supreme People’s Court (SPC) released a 24-article opinion on September 7, 2026, giving the country’s courts guidance for handling civil disputes involving artificial intelligence, according to IAPP and the South China Morning Post. Rather than creating new law, the opinion instructs courts to apply existing statutes — including the Civil Code, the Cybersecurity Law, the Copyright Law, and the Personal Information Protection Law — to AI-related cases, according to the South China Morning Post. The move represents a shift from previous administrative rules toward judicial consistency in applying existing law to AI-related conflicts, according to IAPP.

What We Know

• The guidance sets rules covering AI-generated deepfakes and voice cloning, personality rights, personal information, intellectual property, consumer protection, autonomous vehicles, and the use of AI within judicial proceedings themselves, according to IAPP. It also addresses “everything from privacy breaches and sexual content to fraud and consumer protection,” according to the South China Morning Post.

• For general AI-related torts, the SPC set ordinary fault liability as the default standard, saying the approach is meant to “avoid imposing excessive liability while AI technology and the industry remain at an early stage of development, which could discourage innovation,” according to IAPP and the South China Morning Post.

• AI service providers can be held liable if they are notified that their systems produced infringing content and fail to act promptly, and users who deliberately manipulate prompts to induce a system to generate harmful or infringing content can also be held responsible, according to Xinhua. Businesses that use algorithms to charge different prices or offer different terms for identical goods or services without justification may also face liability if the practice harms consumers, and courts may grant injunctions in cases of imminent, irreversible harm, such as non-consensual synthetic sexual content, according to Xinhua.

• “We cannot expect every consumer to become an expert at spotting deception. The law must step in promptly to protect consumers’ legitimate rights and interests,” said Zhou Jiahai, head of the research office of the SPC, according to Global Times.

• According to Global Times, the guidance also extends protection to deceased individuals, allowing close relatives to seek civil liability when the rights of the deceased are infringed, and takes a deliberately open-ended approach on some emerging issues, leaving them “open for now, with clearer rules to be introduced when sufficient experience has been accumulated.”

• The opinion is also intended to shift evidentiary burdens: courts gain authority to require developers to produce evidence about training data when they control information about otherwise opaque systems, and companies face incentives to document training-data sources, maintain operational records, and implement safeguards, according to IAPP.

What We Don’t Know

• The SPC deliberately left two copyright questions unresolved: whether AI-generated content itself qualifies for copyright protection, and how the unauthorized use of copyrighted material to train AI systems should be treated. The court cited “significant disagreement over these issues during drafting,” according to IAPP.

• It remains unclear how quickly China’s courts will begin applying the new guidance in specific cases, or how the deliberately open-ended provisions on emerging issues will be filled in as case law develops.