A court in the Bavarian capital Munich ruled on Friday that search engine operator Google can be held directly liable for incorrect answers generated by its “AI Overview” feature.
The legal dispute centered on whether the service should receive the same legal treatment as traditional search results.
What did the court say about Google and AI?
Munich Regional Court judges were asked to rule on lawsuits filed against the internet giant by two Munich-based publishing companies.
Google’s Overview feature had erroneously linked companies with questionable business practices, subscription traps, and fraudulent schemes. It had linked the plaintiffs with information about other, in fact, dubious companies and invented connections that did not exist.
Google had argued that it is not responsible for data processing itself and does not adopt the third-party content displayed in the overview as its own.
The court strongly rejected Google’s argument. It ruled that AI summaries do not merely display or link to search results but constitute separate content to the search engine operator.
The defense was relying on existing case law of the Federal Court, which protects search engine operators from direct liability in relation to the simple listing of third party content.
However, the court found that this did not apply to Google’s AI tools.
Why was the AI overview considered different?
Because the AI summarizes the results in its own words, evaluates their content, and presents them in a structured format, the judges rule that Google creates entirely new, independent statements that go beyond mere links.
The court also rejected Google’s line of defense, namely, that users could verify the sources themselves through the links and knew anyway that “AI-generated information should not be blindly trusted.”
The judges said the AI observation is “a self-contained statement with independently understandable content”. The court found that the reader was not given any indication of any unreliability in the content.
The court ordered Google to stop spreading false claims and bear 80% of the legal costs.
A Google spokesperson said: “We invest heavily in the quality of AI observations to ensure that most answers provide accurate information.”
The company said it would carefully review the decision, which is not yet final.
Edited by: Shawn Sinico