Shanghai court holds AI voice-cloning platform liable and shifts the burden of proof on training data

The Shanghai First Intermediate People's Court issued a final ruling on 29 September 2026 in a case brought by a voice actor identified as Ms. Wang against a company referred to as Company A, which had used an AI-synthesized version of her voice in promotional material without authorisation. Company A admitted generating the audio but said it could not verify the training sources because of staff turnover.

The court held that using a natural person's voice as training corpus, without consent, to generate a synthetic voice mimicking that person constitutes infringement regardless of the technical method used. On evidence, it established that once a plaintiff shows plausible access to her voice and high similarity between the synthetic and original voice, the burden shifts to the defendant — "the party with exclusive control over training data, model logs, and data-sourcing records" — to prove lawful origin or non-use of the plaintiff's voice. Damages of RMB 50,000 were awarded, calculated with reference to comparable licensing fees, duration of use, scope of dissemination and the contribution of the personality element to commercial value. The ruling rested on Article 1023 of the Civil Code and Article 4 of the Supreme People's Court September 2026 Opinions on AI-related disputes.

Why it matters for digital humans: The evidentiary holding is the consequential part. Voice and likeness claims usually stall because the claimant cannot see inside the training set; shifting that burden to the operator makes the claim practically winnable. For anyone running avatar or voice products in China, this turns data provenance from a compliance nicety into the thing you will be asked to prove in court, and "we no longer have records" is now an answer that loses. The damages figure is small. The source notes the case has not been marked as typical or guiding, so its precedential value may be minimal, but the court expressly ties its reasoning to Article 4 of the Supreme People's Court's September 2026 Opinions, which suggests the approach may be applied more broadly.