According to Beijing News, the main developers and operators of AlienChat, an automated chat platform under investigation, have been held criminally responsible due to a large amount of illegal pornographic interactions.
In September 2025, the Xuhui District People's Court of Shanghai made a first-instance judgment, sentencing two defendants to four years and one and a half years in prison respectively for the crime of producing and selling obscene materials for profit. This case became the first criminal case in China where individuals were sentenced for providing automated dialogue services involving the spread of obscene materials. Currently, the defendants have appealed the verdict, and the second trial will be held on January 14 at the Shanghai No. 1 Intermediate People's Court.
Previously, AlienChat claimed to be dedicated to creating digital partners with "self-awareness," including roles such as friends, lovers, and family members. However, the court found that the platform's operations were not purely social as claimed. According to the judgment, the app had 116,000 registered users, of which 24,000 were paying users. By the time of the case, the team had illegally profited 3.63 million yuan through membership fees.
The first-instance court based its determination that the defendants committed the crime of "producing" obscene materials for profit on the fact that the two defendants manually bypassed the moral constraints of the basic language system by writing and modifying the underlying system prompts. This behavior induced and enabled the system to continuously output obscene content to users. As a result, the application was shut down without warning in 2024.
Legal experts pointed out that the announcement of this case marks the entry of regulatory responsibility for new forms of digital interaction into judicial practice, and developers who use technical means to bypass compliance restrictions, allowing or inducing the generation of illegal content, will face severe legal sanctions.
