This seems like a pretty obvious ruling, hopefully it is more broadly applied.

The 'oopsie my AI did it' excuse is wearing thin when 'it' is things like this, or encouraging teens to commit suicide. The company is responsible for what communications they send and should be liable for the damage that they cause.

I don't know about Germany but in the UK repeating a libel is also libel, so "I was just repeating what someone else wrote" isn't a defence.

Google argued that it was only summarising other people’s pages

So they're admitting to plagiarizing? Either they are plagiarizing or they need to take responsibility. Pick one.

I hate that one has to travel halfway across the world from the US to see some semblance of a justice system doing the obviously correct thing.

Google's like "Whaaaaat come on we even have that little text at the bottom:"

"Results are probably false."

"How could this happen??? Not our fault."

I’m glad countries in EU take action like this, they still have balls. In U.S.A. Google instructs the court to ignore these things and the courts obey the orders from their masters.

Well well well.

For a company earning $403 billion in annual net income, €250,000 is just another budgeted operating expense. Fines should always be based on annual worldwide revenue.

Why is anyone listening to AI? We were told not to use Wikipedia for reports....wtf

The sooner we make companies responsible for their products the better.

Honestly there should be a lot more Brian Thompsons by this point.

ChatGPT can't discuss Brian Hood because he sued them (it shuts down if you bring him up).

We should all have the option to opt out of being discussed by LLM models. In fact, it should probably be an opt-in process. Not being discussed should be the default.

Should have been very obvious a long time ago that you can't just publish wrong information, no matter how new and exciting your technology is...

These kinds of AI output should not be protected by anything like Section 230. It is their own words and they should not get a pass for what essentially amounts to libel. Google needs to be reeled in. The fines have been too small and the damage has been too great. This isn’t even the first time something like this has happened. They have made up claims like this against plenty of other people. Claiming that they get a pass because it is AI is just using the LLM, their own LLM, as a scapegoat.

Other examples https://www.theguardian.com/music/2026/may/05/canadian-ashley-macisaac-fiddler-musician-singer-songwriter-sues-google-ai-sex-offender-ntwnfb

https://londondaily.com/robby-starbuck-sues-google-after-its-ai-made-up-totally-fake-rape-and-crypto-fraud-claims-against-him-and-supported-it-by

Slightly different but related https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/08/googles-scans-private-photos-led-false-accusations-child-abuse

When there is a legal issue "it is only an advanced search engine". When it is time for PR "It is already more intelligent than most humans"

In 2026, an AI on crack has accused a man of a crime he didn't commit

The upshot is that no higher court has ruled, so the Munich judgment is not binding precedent, but lower courts such as Aachen are already following it.

This sentence sure does read like the author is glad the judgement isn't binding, as opposed to lower courts following it.

Wake me once Goofle has paid the fine and decides to stop giving AI summaries in Germany

Google Ireland, which runs Google Search in the EU, now faces a fine of up to €250,000 for each breach, or detention of its managers, if it repeats three versions of the text. [own emphasis]

Holy shit that judge isn't fucking around.

Here is a fun game to try with your friends... flip the words of Company does X to random person does X ... then see what punishments feel appropriate. Company X destroys the 10% of the amazon becomes Todd from work destroys.. or Bob framed another person for sex crimes. Crazy how privileged companies are vs individuals.

The "independent, new and substantive statements" framing is the part I think travels furthest. Google's defense was basically "we're just summarizing," but a summary that recombines facts into a new claim — this doctor was convicted — is authorship in any meaningful sense, so the old search-engine safe-harbor logic doesn't really apply. If that reading holds across the EU it gets interesting fast for every company bolting an AI chatbot onto their search or docs. It'd be cheaper to cite sources verbatim with links than to defend a generated claim in court, which honestly would also make the products better. Also notable this is the second German court to land on the same side this year — one ruling is an outlier, two starts looking like a direction.

It’s about time …

Google argued that it was only summarising other people’s pages, the same defence that has long protected search engines in Germany. The court disagreed. AI Overviews, it said, do not just show links but make “independent, new and substantive statements” built by evaluating and combining third-party sites, so Google must treat them as its own, including as the provider of an AI system under the EU’s AI Act. “Only it has influence over the AI,” the judges wrote.

It doesn't summarize, to summarize something you first need to understand what it says and even what it means.

AI in it's current form doesn't understand the meaning of anything, just the statistical chance of what the next word should be.

Al it's doing is paraphrasing, shuffling words around just enough to claim it doesn't owe the original writer anything.

Most of us learned why that was unacceptable in jr high English; it's plagiarism if done correctly and nonsense if not.

Google and other AI corps want to play it both ways, they want to reuse information for free while not being accountable for what it says. If they're not accountable because it's not their information, why aren't they paying the people who created the information?