German Court Says Google Is Liable For False Claims In Its AI Overviews Because They Are Its Own Words

from the you-said-it dept

Legal systems have always struggled to keep up with rapid technological change, and things are no different in the world of generative AI. There are still relatively few rulings on the new issues that the roll-out of AI-based services is raising. That makes a ground-breaking judgment from a court in Germany particularly important. It concerns the AI Overview that sits at the top of the Google’s search results. The Decoder summarizes the court’s ruling:

The Regional Court of Munich hit Google with a temporary injunction barring the company from spreading false claims about two Munich-based publishers through its AI-generated search overviews (case no. 26 O 869/26). The court classified Google as a direct infringer because the “AI overview” is its own content, not just a list of search results.

Google’s AI overviews had falsely tied two publishing companies to scams, subscription traps, and shady business practices for certain search queries. According to the court, the AI mixed up information about other, genuinely sketchy companies with the plaintiffs and drew connections that didn’t appear in any of the linked sources. The publishers sent Google a cease-and-desist letter, but Google didn’t respond appropriately.

The legal innovation here is that the local German court held Google liable for the content of its AI Overview. Unlike traditional search results, which simply point to external sources of information, Google’s AI Overview made statements that were original, the court said:

Google’s AI overviews work nothing like traditional search results, the court argues. The AI rewrites and judges results “in its own words and according to its own structure,” the ruling says. In the case at hand, for example, it opened with confident claims like “Yes, [company] is known for dubious business practices,” then built its own structure with a summary, red flags for the alleged scam, and tips for users.

The court also found that the AI overview made claims “that are not even made in the search results.” None of the linked sources drew any connection between the plaintiffs and the shady companies the AI mentioned. The court called these “the defendant’s own statements.”

Google argued that people using its search engine could check the results, but the court dismissed the idea that this was the responsibility of the users. Leaving aside the fact that research from the Pew Research Center last year found that “Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results,” there is also the difficulty of checking statements that have been made up (as in this case), which therefore come with no reference links. The court also dealt with the issue of free speech protection for AI-generated content:

An AI’s opinion is “not the expression of an acquired conviction of the persons expressing it, but the result of an algorithm,” the court wrote.

Offering AI-powered research is “above all an expression of Google’s business activities” and “at most a secondary expression of an interest in being able to freely express one’s opinion and beliefs.”

In a statement given to The Decoder, Google said “We invest deeply in the quality of AI Overviews to ensure that the overwhelming majority of responses provide accurate information, and they are designed to reflect the information that exists on the web.”

Since there is no way to ensure that AI responses are 100% correct, this judgment is a big problem for Google, not least because the company plans to place AI Overviews at the heart of its new AI-saturated search engine, as Techdirt reported recently. Not surprisingly, Google has announced that it will appeal against the ruling, which comes from a local German court. If a higher court upholds the judgment, one solution would be for Google to remove AI Overviews in Germany. That would be messy, but doable. But it’s not clear how other AI companies such as chatbots could do the same, since the AI-generated response generally forms the basis of the whole service. Some might choose to discontinue their operations completely in any jurisdiction that adopts a similar position to the Munich court. That would make the roll-out of international services more difficult.

In a post on his blog, the security guru Bruce Schneier points out that if the ruling stands and is adopted elsewhere, it could have important implications not just for things like Google’s AI Overviews and chatbots, but also for the increasingly popular AI agents:

More generally, liability concerns could mean that many current use cases for agents won’t be commercially viable. Companies may not be able to profitably operate AI lawyers, doctors and media influencers if they are held responsible for what they say and do.

Schneier says that he is “OK with this outcome”:

There’s nothing in the law that requires us to accommodate AI systems if they are fundamentally untrustworthy, just as we don’t need to accommodate untrustworthy human systems. Any company that won’t stand by the statements its agents make—whether human or AI—doesn’t deserve users’ time or money.

Clearly this question of AI and agentic liability requires urgent legal clarification. The German decision should at least help to concentrate people’s minds on the topic.

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Filed Under: ai agents, ai overview, algorithm, doctors, free speech, generative ai, germany, influencers, lawyers, liability, links, scams, search, trust

Companies: google, pew research center, the decoder