A court in China has ruled in favour of a worker who was replaced by artificial intelligence (AI), awarding him more than £28,000 in compensation. The worker, identified only by his surname Zhou, was employed as a quality assurance supervisor at a tech company in Hangzhou, where he oversaw large language models used in AI products.
The company, which has not been publicly named, later determined that AI could perform his role and offered him a demotion with a 40% pay cut. After Zhou refused, the company dismissed him. The Hangzhou Intermediate People’s Court ruled last month that the dismissal was unlawful and ordered the company to pay 260,000 yuan in compensation.
The case has drawn widespread attention as an example of how China can balance its enthusiastic adoption of AI with job security, particularly amid high youth unemployment. Chinese state media described the ruling as sending “a reassuring message to labour rights protection efforts in the age of automation”.
This is not the first time Chinese authorities have ruled in favour of workers affected by AI. Last year, the Beijing local government published an arbitration case in which a company fired a woman with 15 years of service as a manual data collector after introducing an automated data collection tool. The arbitration committee ruled that while employers could incorporate AI, they could not unilaterally shift transition costs onto employees.
