China's Supreme Court Issues First Major AI Judicial Guidance

China’s Supreme People’s Court has issued its first comprehensive judicial guidance on artificial intelligence, establishing a national framework for civil and intellectual property disputes. The opinion allocates liability for infringing AI-generated content among developers, providers, and users based on factors like control and ability to prevent harm, and it allows courts to compel disclosure of training data sources from developers in non-infringement defenses. For patent law, it confirms that AI-assisted inventions are eligible for protection only when a natural person makes a substantive creative contribution. The guidance also offers a conditional liability shield for some open-source developers and adapts safe-harbor principles for generative AI providers. Critically, the SPC deliberately left two of the most contentious global AI legal questions unresolved: whether AI-generated content can be copyrighted and whether training models on copyrighted works is itself infringement. The guidance signals that Chinese courts will take a pragmatic, fault-based approach, and businesses should prepare for scrutiny of their data governance, risk controls, and technical records while watching for pivotal future case law.