Advanced Seminar on Law and Technology
Judging by Algorithm: Socialist Core Values and China’s “Trustworthy” Judicial AI
Date: September 23, 2026 (Wednesday)
Time: 4pm – 5pm
Venue: Room 824, 8/F Cheng Yu Tung Tower, The University of Hong Kong
Speaker: Daniel Sprick (Senior Lecturer for Chinese Legal Culture, University of Cologne)
In November 2024, China’s Supreme People’s Court launched its own large language model, the Faxin Legal Foundation LLM, trained in part to uphold the “Socialist Core Values” that Chinese courts are required to apply in judicial reasoning. This talk asks what it means to build “trustworthy AI” for a court system whose trustworthiness is defined by the party-state rather than by procedural pluralism. Drawing on China’s judicial AI regulations, its technical security standards for generative AI, and the benchmarking ecosystem that tests Chinese LLMs for political reliability, the talk traces how value alignment, usually framed as a safeguard against bias and harm, becomes a mechanism for embedding party-led morality directly into judicial decision-support tools. In doing so, the talk contributes to the global discourse on trustworthy and ethical AI, showing how the same vocabulary can be mobilized toward illiberal ends.
Daniel Sprick is a senior lecturer for Chinese Legal Culture at the University of Cologne, where he specialises in Chinese criminal justice, AI regulation, and the legal architecture of authoritarian governance. He was awarded the Hanenburg-Yntema Prize for a thesis on competition law and received his PhD from the East Asian Institute at UoC on the limits of self-defense in Chinese criminal law. His current research on Socialist Core Values and China’s foreign-related rule of law is funded by the DFG and the German Ministry of Research and Technology.
