A German regional court ruled that Google was responsible for its AI search overviews, potentially leaving Big Tech firms open to defamation lawsuits.
Search engines are partially protected against liability for their results in most jurisdictions, because they point to outside websites. But after Google’s summaries falsely tied two publishing companies to scams, the German court said the AI overviews were the firm’s own content, The Decoder reported.
The ruling is not one of Europe’s periodic “knee-jerk anti-US tech decisions,” The Information’s co-executive editor argued, but a defensible call: Google argued that users could check all the answers, but the court responded that if they have to do that, it would render the summaries pointless.