An adviser to the Court of Justice of the European Union has said that AI chatbots which fetch and reuse news articles in real time to answer users may, in some circumstances, infringe the rights of press publishers. Advocate General Maciej Szpunar gave his opinion on 3 November in Like Company v Google (C-250/25), the first generative AI case to reach the court. A Hungarian web portal operator brought the case against Google Ireland over its Gemini chatbot, and the Budapest Regional Court referred questions to Luxembourg.
Szpunar said the publisher’s right protects how a story is written, not the facts in it. Whether a chatbot infringes depends on two things: whether it reached the article unlawfully, for example by getting round a paywall, and whether its answer reuses the wording so recognisably that the user no longer needs the original. A provider is liable where this is built into its business model, or where it has not taken credible steps to stop it.
On training, he advised the court not to rule, because there was no evidence the publisher’s articles had been used. He added that training a model is, as a rule, allowed under the EU’s text and data mining exception.
The opinion is not binding. The judges have only begun deliberating, and a judgment will follow later.