Taiwan's Criminal Investigation Bureau has opened an investigation into a video that allegedly used an AI-generated voice clone of President Lai Ching-te, testing how far existing forgery law can stretch to cover synthetic political speech. The case has split opinion along political lines and serves as a marker of how differently APAC jurisdictions are approaching deepfake regulation, with Taiwan applying decades-old forgery statutes to technology they were never written for.

Regular readers of this column may agree that, generally speaking, Taiwan's judges are open to new legal theories bred in other jurisdictions, especially when it comes to tech laws.

An amendment to the Criminal Code provisions governing confiscation was passed by Taiwan's Legislative Yuan on 17 December 2015 and will be effective from July 1, 2016.