5th September 2026 – (Hefei) A mainland artificial-intelligence giant has been dragged into a workplace scandal after online posts accused one of its public-relations bosses of an affair with a married subordinate, and a circulated internal notice said he had been stripped of his marketing post—claims none of the parties had formally answered when the story first broke.
On 31st August, social media users shared allegations that Han Yuchen, styled as a public-relations vice-president at iFLYTEK, had been having an extramarital relationship with a female colleague. The woman’s husband published a 22-page document that he said contained intimate chat records between the pair.
According to the husband’s account, his wife—identified in wider reporting as Zhu Qian and referred to in early posts as Ms Zhu—and her superior had been involved for more than a year and had repeatedly booked hotel rooms together. Screenshots circulating with the file showed them addressing each other as “baby” and exchanging graphic sexual messages. The whistle-blower asked whether Han, who was said to have a wife and children of his own, ever considered how such behaviour would hurt his family.
The same day the dossier spread, a personnel circular attributed to iFLYTEK also appeared online. It said Han had been removed as deputy general manager of the Brand and Marketing Centre. The company, the executive and the couple had not issued a formal public response to the affair claims at the time the reports emerged, leaving the leaked notice and the husband’s PDF as the main sources fuelling the debate.
iFLYTEK Co., Ltd., founded in 1999, is a listed intelligent-speech and artificial-intelligence firm well known across the Asia-Pacific. Its work spans speech technology, computer vision, natural language processing and cognitive AI, and it markets itself as operating at the international frontier of those fields—an image now colliding with a raw private dispute playing out in full public view.
Whether the personnel move was a direct answer to the allegation remains unconfirmed by the company in those early reports. What is clear is that the combination of an explicit 22-page dump and a same-day removal notice turned a domestic grievance into a corporate crisis for one of China’s best-known AI brands, with netizens poring over chat screenshots, hotel claims and the unanswered question of how far the firm will go in explaining Han’s departure.
