BERLIN, July 14 (Reuters) – Germany’s media regulator said on Tuesday that Google’s AI Overviews and Perplexity AI are subject to the country’s media \u200claws, stepping up scrutiny of AI-generated content after a German court found \u200cGoogle liable for inaccurate information produced by the feature.<\/p>\n
The Commission for Licensing and Supervision, ZAK, which represents \u200bGermany’s 14 state media authorities, said AI-generated news summaries and chatbot responses constitute content created by the providers themselves rather than merely displaying third-party material.<\/p>\n
The ruling follows increased scrutiny of AI-generated search summaries in Germany and elsewhere in Europe.<\/p>\n
In a separate case, \u200ca court in Munich held \u2060that Google could be directly liable for allegedly false statements generated by its AI Overview feature, finding that AI-produced summaries amounted \u2060to the company’s own content rather than a mere display of third-party information, according to German newspaper publishers’ association BDZV.<\/p>\n
“AI search engines and chatbots are content providers, and we \u200bwill consistently \u200bapply German media law to them from \u200bnow on,” ZAK Chairman Thorsten \u200cSchmiege said in a statement.<\/p>\n
The regulator said the liability exemption under the European Union’s Digital Services Act, which generally shields platforms from responsibility for illegal user-generated content, did not apply in these cases.<\/p>\n
According to the regulator, Google’s AI Overviews are displayed prominently within search results, making traditional lists of links less visible and thereby unfairly \u200cdisadvantaging third-party media content.<\/p>\n
It also argued that chatbots \u200bsuch as Perplexity influence the discoverability of news \u200bcontent when they select and \u200bpresent sources, links or recommendations alongside AI-generated answers.<\/p>\n
Such services could therefore \u200cqualify as media intermediaries and be \u200bsubject to rules designed \u200bto safeguard media plurality.<\/p>\n
Both companies can challenge the decisions through legal channels.<\/p>\n
Perplexity declined to comment on the decision but said it complies with the \u200bEU’s privacy rules, or GDPR, \u200cand holds SOC 2 Type II security and privacy certification.<\/p>\n
Google did not \u200bimmediately respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Klaus Lauer, Writing \u200bby Friederike Heine, Editing by Louise Heavens)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"BERLIN, July 14 (Reuters) – Germany’s media regulator said on Tuesday that Google’s AI Overviews and Perplexity AI…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":105374,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[24,15368,54630,39135,704,132,1429,54627,54628,6643,54629],"class_list":["post-105373","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-google","tag-ai","tag-ai-overviews","tag-content-providers","tag-german-court","tag-germany","tag-google","tag-google-ai","tag-media-content","tag-media-regulator","tag-perplexity-ai","tag-the-commission-for-licensing-and-supervision"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105373","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=105373"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105373\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/105374"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=105373"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=105373"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=105373"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}