A court in Hangzhou — about an hour south of where I live — had just ruled that a tech company illegally fired an employee because his job was taken over by AI. The worker, identified only by his surname Zhou, was a quality assurance supervisor whose job was to verify the accuracy of AI-generated responses. When the models got good enough to do the checking themselves, his company reassigned him to a lower position and cut his salary by 40% — from 300,000 yuan a year to about 180,000. He refused the cut. They fired him.
The court said that was illegal.
I kept reading over my coffee, because this felt like a different kind of story than the usual AI-hype cycle. Not ‘AI will create more jobs than it destroys’ or ‘learn to code.’ A court had actually drawn a line — and the line was this: you don’t get to hand the cost of your technological choices to your employees.
What the Courts Actually Said
The Hangzhou ruling isn’t an isolated incident. In December 2025, Beijing’s Municipal Bureau of Human Resources and Social Security published a set of landmark arbitration cases, including one involving a map data collector whose job was automated away. The arbitration panel was unambiguous: the company’s adoption of AI was a voluntary competitive decision. Using AI replacement as grounds for dismissal shifted the risks of technological change onto the worker — and that’s not legal.
The legal framework being invoked in these cases turns on a specific concept in Chinese labor law: ‘major change in objective circumstances.’ Companies can restructure contracts when something fundamental shifts — a relocation, a merger, a collapse in the market. What the courts are saying now is that choosing to adopt AI doesn’t qualify. That’s an operational decision. You made it. You own the consequences.
Legal scholars in China have started framing it in even starker terms: the costs of technological transformation should not be borne solely by workers.
That phrase has been sitting with me since I read it.
The China Paradox
Here’s what makes this interesting from where I’m standing. China is not pumping the brakes on AI. Quite the opposite. The government is aggressively pushing AI adoption across every sector — manufacturing, finance, logistics, healthcare, education. Chinese tech companies are developing and deploying large language models at a pace that rivals anything happening in the US. This is not a country hesitating about artificial intelligence.
And yet, the courts are signaling something important: speed of adoption doesn’t excuse you from your obligations to the people who work for you. You can automate. You can restructure. But you have to do it with your workers — not to them.
That tension is worth sitting with. Because most of the countries leading AI development — the United States, the UK, much of Europe — haven’t made a similar move. Layoffs driven by AI adoption are largely legal in those places. The burden of technological displacement falls almost entirely on individual workers, who are expected to retrain, upskill, and adapt fast enough to keep up with systems their employers purchased.
China is at least asking whether that’s fair.
What This Is — and Isn’t
I want to be careful here. These rulings don’t protect everyone, and they don’t stop companies from automating. A business that genuinely eliminates a role through restructuring — rather than just cutting pay as a pretext — can still let workers go. The courts are targeting pretextual dismissals, not technological change itself. And enforcement across China’s massive, varied labor market is a real question.
There’s also the larger political context: China’s government has strong reasons to want stable employment and social order, and court rulings often reflect policy priorities as much as pure legal reasoning. This isn’t necessarily a model that translates cleanly to other legal systems.
But even accounting for all of that, what’s happening here is philosophically significant. The question isn’t just ‘did this specific firing follow proper procedure.’ The question being asked is who bears the cost when technology changes the nature of work — and whether it’s acceptable to make that entirely someone else’s problem.
What It Means for Schools
This lands differently when you work in a school.
Teachers are having their own version of this conversation right now, just without the legal framework. AI tools are being adopted by districts and schools at a rapid clip — for lesson planning, grading, feedback, tutoring, assessment, communication. Some of those tools are genuinely useful. Some are being deployed primarily because they’re cheap, not because they’re better.
Nobody has passed a law saying schools can’t replace a teacher’s functions with an AI tool. Nobody’s arbitration panel has ruled that the cost of technological transformation can’t be handed to classroom educators in the form of larger class sizes, reduced support staff, or expectations that AI will just… cover the gap.
But the principle at the heart of the Chinese rulings is worth borrowing: the costs of technological change should not fall entirely on the people at the bottom of the decision chain.
If a school adopts an AI tutoring system, someone still has to know the students it’s failing. If a district deploys an automated feedback tool, someone still has to catch the kids it’s misreading. If administrators push AI into grading and assessment, teachers still have to carry the professional and ethical weight of what those systems get wrong. That labor doesn’t disappear. It just becomes invisible.
The Hangzhou court said, in effect: you can’t just reassign the risk. The same logic applies.
The Takeaway for Teachers
This week, find out what decisions are being made above you about AI adoption — at your school or district level. What tools are being piloted? What roles are being ‘augmented’? Are teachers being consulted, or are systems being handed down from administration with the expectation that educators will absorb whatever the AI can’t handle?
You don’t have to oppose AI adoption to ask these questions. You just have to refuse the idea that the cost of getting it wrong should be yours to carry alone.
That’s what a court in Hangzhou just said. It’s not a bad principle to bring into a staff meeting.
David Jacobson teaches AP World History at Shanghai American School. He writes about AI, education, and the messy intersection of the two at shouldiuse.ai.
