Filed under labour-law.

Hangzhou Priced the Legal-AI Discount

DeepSeek's inference rate of $0.28 per million input tokens sits roughly twelve times below GPT-4o equivalents, making contract review economically tractable for mid-tier law firms. A Hangzhou court ruling of 30 April 2026 established that those margin gains do not constitute 'objective circumstances' under China's Labour Contract Law — firms cannot push the cost of AI transition onto workers. The ruling fixes precisely where the legal-AI discount lands.