A Chinese marketplace's own terms price a licensed face

The figure or the record

On 27 July 2026, Rest of World reported on a small but growing trade: platforms where people license images of their own faces so studios can generate AI performers for short dramas. The report names two operators, Chengdu-based New Claw and Shenzhen-based ActID, and cites figures from interviews with their staff, including a reported per-image range of roughly 15 to 700 US dollars and a 500-yuan floor New Claw says it sets to stop sellers undercutting each other. Those numbers come from people quoted in the piece, not from a document either platform publishes, so this record treats them as reported, not verified.

What the documents establish

New Claw's own user agreement and transaction rules (新爪AIGC用户注册、平台服务协议与交易规则, read here in the original Chinese) is the primary document this record relies on. Version V1.1, published 10 September 2026 and effective 17 September 2026 Beijing time, states that the platform will not treat silence as consent: an authorising party's agreement takes effect only after an active checkbox confirmation or another provable step, and browsing public pages alone is not consent. Payment is set order by order, at a total price the buyer confirms before submitting, rather than a published rate card. The rules distinguish a 'whitelist' pre-clearance of acceptable subjects from the binding authorisation attached to a specific order, and they require buyers to add AI-generation labels as China's deep-synthesis provisions already require of face and voice edits.

Scope and caveats

The terms cover one platform's contractual relationship between buyers and onboarded 'authorising parties', who may be the person themselves or an agency with documented authority. They say nothing about how much a licensor actually earns after any commission, a figure Rest of World's sourcing puts at 10% for ActID but which no document here confirms independently. The rules also bar reselling source material, using a licensed face for fraud or defamation, or producing content that would let the public mistake a synthetic performance for the real person's own words without a disclaimer. Minors are barred from acting as authorising parties in their own right. None of this establishes how widely such platforms are used, only what one of them commits to in writing.

What to watch

Editorially, the useful signal is whether reported per-project prices start appearing inside a platform's own published order data or dispute rulings, rather than only in interviews, and whether other marketplaces publish comparably specific consent and labelling terms rather than marketing pages alone.

• Does a licensing platform's own document, not a spokesperson, state the commission it takes and the minimum it enforces?
• Is consent recorded per project, or does a standing 'whitelist' get treated as if it were final authorisation?
• Does the buyer's finished output carry the AI-generation label the platform's rules and Chinese regulation both require?

A rate quoted by a platform employee and a rate written into a binding transaction document are different kinds of evidence, and a ledger that blurs them will overstate how standardised this market already is.