According to the official account of the program "Case Focus," the Pudong New Area People's Court of Shanghai recently ruled on the first case involving AI voice impersonation and unfair competition in Shanghai.

In 2025, miHoYo discovered that an AI voice-changing software provided 63 voice resource packages of characters from "Genshin Impact," allowing users to pay for voice changes. At the same time, the software also extensively used images of characters from "Genshin Impact." miHoYo then filed a lawsuit against the operator of the software, claiming that the voice-changing service would cause confusion in auditory perception—"regardless of what is said, it would be converted into the specific voice and tone of a particular character."

"Tend to identify as the same" in judicial appraisal; defendant admits unauthorized training

The defendant argued that the voice-changing service was a result of AI large model training, and the voice effect varied from person to person. Furthermore, the voice rights belonged to the voice actors, who should be the ones to claim them.

However, the voiceprint judicial appraisal provided a key conclusion: the test audio of "Genshin Impact" characters in the AI voice-changing software was "tended to identify as the same" with the original voice of the game characters. More importantly, the defendant admitted during the trial that they had used one-minute audio of "Genshin Impact" characters without permission, mixed with other sound materials, to train their own AI voice-changing model.

Judge Xu Hongtao from the Intellectual Property Trial Division of the Pudong People's Court explained: "In the game, the voice characteristics of a character are more determined by specific elements such as the character's preset attributes and skills, rather than being left to the personalized performance of the voice actor." In other words, the voice characteristics of a game character are determined by its preset attributes and have the function of identifying the source of goods—the so-called "commercial identifier." The Pudong People's Court ultimately ruled that the defendant must immediately stop the unfair competition behavior and compensate the plaintiff 750,000 yuan.

Notably, on September 7, 2026, the Supreme People's Court issued the "Opinions on Legally Adjudicating Cases Involving Artificial Intelligence," which is the first judicial regulation document on artificial intelligence issued by the country's highest judicial authority. The "Opinions" stated that unless otherwise stipulated by law, if someone uses a natural person's voice as training material without the natural person's consent, imitates their voice tone, intonation, and speaking style to generate synthetic voices that can identify the natural person, the court will support the natural person's claim of infringement of their voice rights. This means that AI stealing voices is no longer in a legal gray area.