Shanghai court orders AI voice service to pay miHoYo 750,000 yuan over 63 Genshin Impact character voices

What happened

The Pudong New Area People's Court in Shanghai ruled that an unnamed Shanghai information-technology company infringed miHoYo's copyright and engaged in unfair competition by selling AI voice packs that recreated the voices of 63 characters from the game Genshin Impact. The court ordered the company to stop the conduct immediately and pay miHoYo 750,000 yuan (about $112,000). miHoYo had sought 5 million yuan in damages and costs. The company appealed and then withdrew the appeal, so the decision took effect.

The AI training admission

The company ran an AI voice-changing app in which users bought voice packs and had their voices converted in real time into a character's voice during live chat. Voiceprint analysis presented in the case found the app's voices and the corresponding game character voices had "nearly identical characteristics". The company admitted in court that it had mixed one minute of a Genshin Impact character's audio with other material to train its voice-conversion model. It argued that its service ran on large-scale AI models so outputs depended on user input, and that any rights in the voices belonged to the voice actors rather than the studio.

What the court protected

The court split its reasoning. Character designs are artworks and the game's continuous footage is an audiovisual work, so using character images, story animations, altered character art as pack avatars, and previews of the characters' original recorded lines without permission was copyright infringement. The voices were handled differently: after years of the game running, the court said the character voices had become the core auditory marker by which the public identifies the game, part of a commercial identity with real influence. Copying them in bulk for a voice-changing business, with altered character avatars and original-line previews, showed an intent to ride on the game's fame and was likely to make people think the service was officially linked to miHoYo. That went beyond the reasonable scope of using AI to copy another's voice and was unfair competition. The court trimmed damages because the app offered more than 500 voice packs and only the infringing ones counted, refusing to treat the company's whole revenue as profit from infringement.

Limits of this item

The defendant AI company is unnamed in every source read; miHoYo is the plaintiff rights holder, not the AI maker, and is submitted as a new company on that basis. The ruling protects the voices as part of the game's commercial identity, not as the performers' voice rights: the voice actors were not parties, and the court rejected the argument that the actors, rather than the studio, should assert the claims. The court also said businesses may draw on basic vocal traits to imitate a voice, preserving room for technological innovation in AI voice processing and model training. The judgment date is reported as 30 June 2026 by the most detailed account, which distinguishes it from the court's 10 September 2026 press presentation of the case as Shanghai's first unfair-competition case involving an AI voice copy; some outlets report 10 September as the ruling date.