Jujutsu Kaisen Voice Actor Gets Landmark AI Voice Protection in Japan

A Japanese court has made a significant ruling over the use of performers’ voices in the age of generative AI after a legal challenge involving Jujutsu Kaisen voice actor Kenjiro Tsuda. The Tokyo District Court handed down its judgment on Wednesday, September 30, 2026, recognising that a person’s voice can potentially be protected under publicity rights when its commercial value is being exploited.

Tsuda did not receive a payout and the court did not order TikTok to remove any videos. His specific request for removal was dismissed because the account and disputed videos had already been deleted, while no claim for financial damages had been made in the case.

However, the judgment still produced a potentially important result for actors, singers and other performers worried about AI-generated copies of their voices. The court stated that a person’s voice, like their likeness, can represent part of their identity and can fall within the protection of publicity rights in certain commercial circumstances.

What happened in the TikTok case?

The case centred on an anonymous TikTok account that had posted at least 188 videos between July 2024 and September 2025. The videos covered subjects including urban legends and paranormal stories, with narration that Tsuda’s side argued imitated his distinctive voice using generative AI.

Tsuda is internationally known for voicing Kento Nanami in the Japanese version of Jujutsu Kaisen, as well as Seto Kaiba in Yu-Gi-Oh! and numerous characters across anime, games, television and film. His legal team argued that viewers were being attracted to the videos because the narration sounded like the recognisable performer, despite Tsuda having no involvement with them.

The account became substantial before the dispute reached court, attracting more than 210,000 followers. It was alleged during the proceedings that the creator was receiving between 500,000 and 750,000 yen a month from views, although the eventual judgment did not determine whether those particular videos amounted to an infringement of Tsuda’s rights.

Tsuda had initially tried to identify the person behind the account, with an information disclosure request made in June 2025 and an order granted that August. That effort did not identify the creator because the relevant IP address logs were no longer available, and Tsuda subsequently sought removal of the videos before filing his lawsuit in November 2025.

Why did the court dismiss his claim?

The outcome becomes clearer once the timing is taken into account. During the court proceedings, the person running the account deleted it on May 29, 2026, and did not apply to restore it during TikTok’s recovery period.

The court determined that the video data had consequently disappeared from the platform’s servers by June 28. Because the material Tsuda wanted removed no longer existed by the time the proceedings concluded, there was nothing remaining for TikTok to be ordered to delete.

That is why Tsuda technically lost the removal claim, rather than because the court decided that AI imitation of his voice was acceptable. His legal team has said it does not intend to appeal, while also making clear that financial compensation was never the objective of the proceedings.

No damages were therefore awarded because none had been requested. From Tsuda’s side, the practical objective of getting the account and videos removed had already been achieved before judgment was delivered.

What did the court actually decide about AI voices?

The more significant part of the September 30 judgment concerned the wider question of whether somebody’s voice can receive protection under publicity rights. These rights generally protect the commercial attraction associated with a person’s identity, such as a famous name or image.

The Tokyo District Court said a voice can similarly be regarded as a symbol of an individual’s personality. Where a performer’s voice itself has the power to attract customers or audiences, unauthorised use aimed specifically at exploiting that commercial attraction can potentially amount to an infringement of publicity rights.

There is an important limitation to the ruling. Because the disputed videos had already disappeared, the court did not make a final finding that these specific TikTok videos infringed Tsuda’s publicity rights.

Instead, it established the broader legal principle that a voice can fall within those rights. Tsuda’s lawyer described it after the judgment as the first Japanese ruling to explicitly place a person’s voice within the scope of publicity rights.

Why the ruling matters for actors and creators

The distinction could become increasingly important as AI voice-generation tools become easier to use. Modern systems can analyse recordings of a performer and produce entirely new spoken material that resembles their voice, allowing somebody to create hours of apparent dialogue without the original person ever saying those words.

That affects far more than anime voice actors. Singers, film and television performers, audiobook narrators, online creators and other people whose voices form an important part of their professional identity could face similar questions about who is allowed to reproduce them and under what circumstances.

Japan had already begun addressing the issue before this judgment. In August 2026, guidance from the country’s Ministry of Justice said voices could receive existing legal protections, including publicity rights, despite there being no standalone Japanese law simply granting someone ownership of their voice.

The Tokyo District Court ruling now adds a judicial decision to that developing framework. It does not ban AI voice generation, establish that every imitation is unlawful or automatically give performers damages when somebody sounds like them.

Instead, the judgment draws attention to how the voice is being used and whether somebody is commercially exploiting the recognition attached to another person. For the entertainment industry, that could prove an important distinction as synthetic voices become increasingly difficult to distinguish from the performers they imitate.

Tsuda therefore leaves the case without compensation or a formal takedown order, but with a legal finding that could matter to performers far beyond his own dispute. The videos disappeared before the court could decide whether they themselves infringed his rights, yet the judgment has made something much clearer than before: in Japan, a commercially valuable voice can potentially receive legal protection in its own right.