EU Advocate General says AI chatbot answers can infringe press rights

EU Advocate General says AI chatbot answers can infringe press rights

3 November 2026: An Advocate General at the Court of Justice of the European Union, Maciej Szpunar, has advised that a generative AI chatbot can infringe the rights of press publishers when its answers reuse the recognisable form of expression of their articles, in the first case about generative AI to reach the Court. His opinion in Case C-250/25, Like Company v Google Ireland, is not binding; the judges now deliberate and will give judgment later.

Not yet independently verified. We have read the Court's press release, not the full opinion; the opinion does not bind the Court, and the expectation of a judgment in 2027 comes from heise and dpa, not from the Court. We will update this when it can be confirmed, and remove this note.

The case and the questions

Like Company, which runs a Hungarian news portal, sued Google over answers given by its Gemini chatbot between 13 June 2023 and 31 May 2024. The Budapest Regional Court asked the Court of Justice four questions, two about training large language models and two about the answers the chatbot gives.

Szpunar advises that the two training questions are inadmissible: there was no evidence that the portal's articles were used to train the model, and training is not an "online use" of a press publication. For completeness he adds that training is, as a rule, freely permitted under the EU's text and data mining exception.

Where answers cross the line

The press publishers' right protects the specific form in which a story is told, not the facts in it. On that basis the opinion sets out two tests for the reproduction right: whether the chatbot reached the publication unlawfully, for example by getting around a paywall or technical measures against scraping, and whether its answer reuses the form of expression so recognisably that the user no longer needs to visit the original. The right to make content available is, as a rule, infringed where the form of expression is "systematically recognisable" in the answers.

Liability rests with the provider where such uses are inherent in its business model, or where it has not put credible and effective counter-measures in place.

What AI product teams should note

The opinion matters most for products that fetch news in real time to answer questions, the retrieval-augmented pattern most AI assistants and search features now use, rather than for model training. If the Court follows it, providers serving EU users would need to show that retrieval respects paywalls and anti-scraping measures, and that answers summarise rather than reproduce publishers' wording. heise reports, citing dpa, that a judgment is unlikely before 2027.

Sources

• Court of Justice of the EU: press release No 155/26, Advocate General's Opinion in Case C-250/25 Like Company, 3 November 2026
• heise online: EuGH-Gutachten, KI-Chatbots können Urheberrecht verletzen (German), 4 November 2026