EU court adviser: AI chatbots like Gemini can infringe press publishers' rights

On 3 November 2026, Advocate General Maciej Szpunar delivered his opinion in case C-250/25, Like Company v Google Ireland, the first generative AI case to reach the Court of Justice of the European Union. His view, set out in the Court's press release: when an AI chatbot retrieves an online press article in real time, reuses it to generate an answer and gives that answer to the user, "the press publisher's right may be infringed in certain circumstances."

The case

Like Company, a Hungarian operator of several web portals, sued Google before the Budapest Regional Court. It claims Google used its articles to train the Gemini models and reproduced them and made them available to the public through the Gemini chatbot between 13 June 2023 and 31 May 2024, according to the press release. The Hungarian court paused the case and sent four questions to the Court of Justice: two on training, two on the chatbot's answers.

Training: inadmissible, and allowed as a rule

Szpunar advises the Court to declare the two training questions inadmissible. There is no evidence Like Company's articles were used to train Gemini, and training an LLM is not an "online use" of press publications, so the questions are hypothetical. For completeness, he adds that training on protected works is, "as a rule, freely permitted under the text and data mining exception" (press release; full opinion).

Answers: two tests

On chatbot answers, the publisher's right protects the form of expression of an article, not the facts it reports. Whether an answer falls under the reproduction right depends on two factors, per the press release:

• whether the chatbot accessed the article unlawfully, in particular by circumventing effective technical measures such as a paywall or anti-scraping protections;
• whether the answer only reports facts, or reuses the article's wording in a recognisable way, to the point that the user no longer needs to open the original.

The opinion is not binding. Reuters, via CNA, notes that the Court follows most of its advisers' opinions and will rule in the coming months.

Why it matters

For AI users, this is about the answers they read every day: summaries that track an article closely, or that come from behind a paywall, could create liability for the chatbot provider in the EU. For publishers and advertisers, it adds a European legal basis to the fight over AI answers replacing the click to the source page, a day after the New York Times sued Brave in the US over AI scraping. A final judgment against Google could, Reuters writes, force it to pay for that content.