Beijing Internet Court
- Chinese name
- 北京互联网法院
- Pinyin
- Unified Social Credit Code
11110000MB1998909Pregistered in Beijing 北京
The Beijing Internet Court (北京互联网法院), established on 9 September 2018, hears Beijing’s internet-related civil and administrative cases online, and has become one of the main sources of Chinese case law on digital humans and AI-generated likenesses.
It runs a digital human of its own. On 27 June 2019 it opened an online litigation service centre that includes an AI virtual judge (AI虚拟法官): a female figure whose voice, facial expressions and movements are synthesised from a real person, which guides litigants through filing in real time and takes on repetitive reception work for the court’s judges.
Its rulings have set early markers for the sector. In April 2024 it decided China’s first case on AI-generated voice, holding that a person’s voice rights extend to an AI voice that listeners can identify as theirs, and ordered the defendants to pay a dubbing artist 250,000 yuan for turning her recorded voice into a text-to-speech product without consent. In August 2025 it published a judgment holding that original virtual digital human images are works of fine art protected by copyright, in a case brought by the companies that co-created two virtual humans against a former employee who sold their models without authorisation; it awarded 15,000 yuan, and the ruling was later reported as upheld on appeal.