Filed under duty-of-care
Every brief tagged "duty-of-care".
- § 01 · AI-GOVERNANCE
China's First 'AI Hallucination' Tort Judgment — GenAI Is a Service, Not a Product, and the Chatbot's '¥100,000 Promise' Binds No One
The Hangzhou Internet Court has decided China's first 'AI hallucination' (AI幻觉) tort case — written into the Supreme People's Court's 2026 work report to the NPC. A user asking a chatbot about college applications was told, across seven rounds, that a non-existent campus existed; when finally shown the official website, the model 'apologised' and 'promised' to pay ¥100,000, even generating a fake lawsuit template telling him to sue. He did. The court dismissed every claim and, in doing so, laid down the first judicial articulation of China's generative-AI liability framework: (1) an AI model is not a civil subject, so its 'promise' is no declaration of intent — and is not attributable to the provider either; (2) generative AI is a service, not a product, so fault liability under Civil Code Article 1165 applies, not product liability's no-fault rule under Article 1202; (3) there is no result-based duty to guarantee accuracy for ordinary inaccurate output — only a process duty of care (conspicuous AI-content labelling plus industry-standard accuracy measures), which the provider had discharged; and (4) no proven damage, no causation. For any company deploying GenAI to the Chinese public, this is the operating liability surface and the evidentiary playbook.