Google’s AI search told users that an Aachen doctor had been convicted of a sex crime. The conviction belonged to a different man, and on September 24 the Aachen Regional Court [in Germany] banned Google from repeating it, ruling that the company answers for what its AI Mode says. It is the second German court this year to treat Google’s AI answers as Google’s own words, and the first ruling to say so has now been settled rather than tested on appeal.
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The doctor asked Google to delete the text on August 28 and followed up with a formal legal warning on September 15. Neither worked. The court’s 8th civil chamber then acted without hearing Google first, citing the urgency of false claims that were “publicly visible” to an unlimited audience. 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. Google can still challenge the order.
The court’s reasoning is blunt: Google “provides AI-generated search and is therefore also responsible for the answers generated in this context.” It added that checking would have been easy: had Google “confronted its own AI” with the doctor’s objections, it would have found the statements were false.
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That reasoning comes almost word for word from Munich. On May 28 the Munich Regional Court I ruled (case 26 O 869/26) on AI Overviews that told searchers two Munich publishing companies were “known for dubious business practices”, ran subscription traps and kept changing their names to avoid being traced. None of the linked sources said that; the first one cited did not mention the companies at all.
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.
Google said at the time it would appeal. That appeal has ended in a settlement, The Decoder reported on Saturday; the terms are not known and neither Google nor the publishers would comment. 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.
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Fines should actually impact companies, not just be another cost of doing business. By imposing a high dollar value fine per violation, regardless of frequency of violation, companies may actually be incentivized to stop breaking the law in order to continue existing
There’s a difference for a one-time fine that covers continued wrong doing over a period of time, and a fine about a specific instance of misbehaviour.
The first don’t accrue, and I agree, should be based on revenue so that they serve as actual punishment and serve as future deterrent.
But a €250k that can be slapped by thousands of cases that happen every day (AI providing wrong information) has the potential to be massive as well.
I think the point other people are making is that this can set precedent in German law and allow other people with similar issues to bring suit and win on merit and not have to fight as hard for their case to be considered. It could also end up inspiring similar cases in other countries using similar frameworks, adapted for local laws.
If suddenly Alphabet has thousands people taking to them to court in jurisdictions all over the world, that can indeed hurt them, although it will take longer than injunctions on Google now, I fully agree.