On September 9, the Supreme People's Court released nine typical cases of unfair competition in 2026. The published cases cover unfair competition behaviors such as AI-generated bulk fake reviews, live-stream manipulation of product links, malicious "Zhuanzhuan reconstruction," commercial defamation, and false advertising, serving as a model for the healthy and standardized development of the platform economy.Article author, source: AIBase
On September 9, the Supreme People's Court released nine typical cases of anti-unfair competition in 2026. Case five involves the use of a physical cheat tool to snatch orders, undermining the platform's fair competitive order, and holds exemplary significance for the healthy and standardized development of the platform economy.
A "slide-to-click" device sold for millions of yuan, ordered to pay 3 million in damages
In this case, three companies, including a technology company, operated a food delivery platform and a crowdsourcing platform. Starting in 2024, these three companies received numerous complaints from riders using external devices to snatch orders. Investigations revealed that an electronics company sold a product called "PointSlip" on an e-commerce platform and published tutorials instructing riders to connect the device to the platform’s app, set commands, and automatically snatch orders at a speed far exceeding manual operation. The total sales of this product reached millions of yuan.
The First Instance Court of the Huangpu District People's Court in Guangzhou, Guangdong Province, determined that the涉案 point-sliding device circumvented platform operational rules through technical means, disrupted the normal functioning of the scheduling algorithm, and caused the order allocation mechanism to fail, thereby substantially obstructing the platform’s normal business operations. Additionally, riders using this device could unfairly secure high-quality orders first, undermining the fair competitive environment among riders and directly reducing legitimate riders’ opportunities to obtain orders. Unauthorized order-snatching also frequently led to issues such as order cancellations and delivery delays, harming the legitimate rights and interests of consumers and merchants on the platform. The court therefore ordered the electronic company to pay damages of RMB 3 million; this first-instance judgment has taken effect.
AI-generated fake reviews and live-streamed product link manipulation have both been called out.
The nine cases released in this announcement cover legal issues such as imitation and confusion, infringement of trade secrets, commercial defamation, false advertising, and online unfair competition. Case three clarifies that systematically replacing the core functions of another party’s online product through malicious “transcoding and reconstruction” while embedding one’s own services for profit constitutes unfair competition. Case six points out that using AI technology to batch-generate and publish fabricated product reviews to piggyback on traffic constitutes unfair competition. Case seven determines that live e-commerce platforms using technical means to alter recommended products in competitors’ live-streaming videos and mislead consumers constitute false advertising. Case eight clarifies that competitors who maliciously edit and splice review videos to denigrate the performance of rival products constitute commercial defamation. Case nine holds that publishing negative evaluations in comparative advertising without professional basis, where consumers can identify the compared products, constitutes commercial defamation.
The Supreme People's Court stated that the next step will be to further strengthen judicial efforts against unfair competition, refine competition-related adjudication rules, and provide judicial support for accelerating the construction of a unified national market.