MiHoYo just got ¥750,000 richer after a Shanghai court slapped an unnamed AI voice service for cloning 63 Genshin Impact character voices and selling them as paid packs. The defendant trained its model on one stolen minute of game audio, then slapped character art and animations into ads while letting users preview stolen lines before checkout. Voiceprint analysis confirmed the output was "nearly identical" to the originals, and the court ruled the voices function as commercial identifiers tied to the game itself.

The June 30 ruling marks Shanghai's first AI voice unfair competition case. The company tried arguing the models just reflected user input and that voice rights belonged to the actors anyway, but judges weren't buying it after the training admission and forensic match. They ordered an immediate stop to the packs and damages covering miHoYo's losses plus legal costs; the appeal got withdrawn and the verdict stuck.

This sets a clear line in China for commercial AI voice tools: training on unauthorized game audio and reselling the results crosses into unfair competition, not just gray-area tech. Other gacha devs watching their own voice lines get cloned now have precedent to point at. The real winners here are the companies actually paying voice actors instead of scraping one minute and calling it innovation.