80
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Landmark German ruling declares Google's AI Overviews are Google's own words and makes it liable for false answers
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- Authors
- Matthias Bastian
- Published
- Jun 9 2026
- Word count
- 1200 words
I thought this article was worth sharing, because it highlights ways that the push to Gen AI challenges the foundations of how the Internet operates.
Most of the legal questions I've seen for LLMs have touched on whether it was legal for companies to scrape the entire internet as input to train their models. But the article touches on the other end, "are companies liable for the output of their models?"
In many jurisdictions, like Germany, companies are shielded from being liable for 3rd party content that they host and serve on their platforms. That shield is foundational to the operation of sites, like Google or Tildes, that primarily surface content they did not create. The German Court's decision marks the first move I've seen to strip that protection from content synthesized by an LLM, which could jeopardize many company's pushes towards "AI Everything".
The United States' version of that shield is Section 230, "the law that built the internet". I'm curious whether there'd be a move to follow the German court's lead, and clarify whether Section 230 protects LLM content too.
Further Reading
BEYOND SECTION 230 (2024)
This seems like extremely common sense. You're either quoting someone else's writing or writing something yourself. If they want the freedom that comes with "AI isn't stealing, it's creating something new" necessarily includes "my business is creating and publishing novel content", and of course a business should be responsible for the content it publishes.
Right. Of course. But they (along with facebook) have been trying to push a narrative "It's not us, it's The Algorithm" for quite some time - long before LLMs - so it is refreshing to see them getting slapped.
For sure. I hope it wakes us up to a whole new way of thinking about accountability. I've long ranted about the dangers and societal harms of The Algorithm.
Ars Technica article (I'm intentionally not linking it) on the same court case used Google translate, without a trace of irony, to translate the German court's ruling.
I don't get it?
Google Translate uses LLMs now.
I didn't even know this.
My focus was simply, "using Google AI to translate German court ruling that concludes Google AI can't be trusted to be accurate".
And (personal opinion) it's really bad. I have better results directly asking chatGpt to translate phrases between languages.
Would it be any different if the user requested the AI overview? I'm curious whether the user requesting something changes the liability in any way. Because of how LLMs work, users can request "wrong" answers. I don't really want any government too involved in deciding what's true or false.
This could happen with any LLM. If upheld, this could significantly affect how LLMs are offered in Germany.
Yeah, I think the difference in push vs pull here is probably significant (or at least should be IMO). AI overviews strike me as being conceptually closer to broadcast media, to be treated as a statement that the company or their spokesperson is actively choosing to put out into the world. If a company runs a headline that <corporation> are scammers, however that headline came to exist, it seems very reasonable to hold them responsible for it.
Direct LLM chats are more like talking to customer service - the company should still definitely bear some responsibility for who (or what model) they choose to employ, but ultimately a reasonable person should probably also understand that if Clive is having a bad day and goes off the rails, he still doesn’t actually have the power to fire the CEO and give the job to you instead, and you probably shouldn’t listen to him if he tells you the lizard people are in the walls watching you. If Clive does something less egregious, like wrongly saying that <corporation> are scammers, he needs additional training not to say things like that. That’s true whether Clive is a person or an LLM.
If a thousand people all hear from Clive and all his colleagues that <corporation> are scammers, even in direct chats to each individual, then we’re back into holding the company as a whole more strictly liable for allowing a systematic problem like that to happen.
[Edit] Grammar
AI overviews aren't the same as just talking to an LLM, and if the LLM gives you a wrong answer when you ask for one...that's actually a correct answer. I suppose it would be possible to use some sort of prompt engineering to create conditions where you could sue, but that seems very risky.
This sounds like common sense.
Companies are generally liable for the content they put on their websites, which is partly why social media removed harmful or illegal content.
Why would AI be any different?
Plus, ultimately this should be considered a great thing because it forces innovation into accuracy as opposed to complacency with mediocre inaccuracy.
There are better and more accurate models, but they're far too expensive to run on every single query. They're also slower than users expect from Google.
Sounds like Google would have to basically pull out of that market or be faced with absurd liability? Or at least all AI responses.
They'd sooner disable the responses than pull out of the market (unless they really want to make a point and anger Brussels for little benefit).