Shanghai Court Orders AI Voice Changer to Pay Damages for Cloning Genshin Impact Voices
A court in Shanghai ruled that an app selling AI-cloned voices of video game characters infringed copyright and amounted to unfair competition. The Pudong New Area People's Court ordered the operator, a Shanghai information technology firm, to stop and pay RMB 750,000 in damages and enforcement costs to miHoYo, the developer of Genshin Impact, which operates internationally as HoYoverse. The judgment has been final since around September 2026, after the defendant withdrew its appeal. Media coverage of the court's reasoning appeared on 28 and 29 October 2026.
According to the reports, the app offered paid voice packs that let users sound like 63 Genshin Impact characters in real-time voice chat. Jiemian put the prices at RMB 19 to 59 per pack. To promote them, the operator used the game's character art and story animations in videos, adapted character images as pack icons and played original dialogue lines as previews. A forensic comparison found the preview audio very close to the original voices, and the operator admitted in court that it had trained its model on character audio mixed with other material, without permission.
The operator argued that only the distinctive voice of an identifiable real person is protected. The court took a different route. It held that the character designs are artworks and the continuous game footage is an audiovisual work, so using them without a licence infringed copyright. Separately, cloning the voices in bulk and packaging them with the game's imagery was an attempt to trade on the game's reputation that could lead users to assume an authorised link, which the court treated as unfair competition. Judge Xu Hongtao noted that the voice actors had assigned the economic rights in their recordings to the game company by contract, and that protecting a well-known character voice as a business identifier does not conflict with the actors' own personality rights.
Judge Xu also stressed limits on the ruling. Imitating general vocal styles or basic voice traits is still allowed, he said, leaving room for AI voice tools and model training. The ruling sits alongside the September 2026 opinions on AI-related disputes issued by China's Supreme People's Court, which address the use of a person's voice as training data.
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