Tech

China has decided that firing a worker because an AI can do their job is illegal. No Western country has done the same.

China’s labor arbitration courts have ruled that replacing employees with AI—even when the tech matches or exceeds human performance—constitutes unlawful termination, a precedent no Western jurisdiction has codified. The case centers on a Hangzhou QA engineer earning $3,640 monthly, whose role vetting LLM outputs was deemed irreplaceable under local statutes, forcing reinstatement or severance penalties. The decision erects a legal firewall around algorithmic displacement that Silicon Valley’s gig-economy playbooks have yet to confront. AI-assisted, human-reviewed.

A quality assurance supervisor identified only as Zhou joined a technology company in Hangzhou in November 2022. His job was to work with AI large language models, optimising their outputs and filtering sensitive content. He earned 25,000 yuan per month, roughly $3,640. In 2024, the company decided that its AI systems had improved to the […] This story continues at The Next Web

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