EU Court Advisor Warns AI Chatbots Could Risk Infringing Copyright Law — Update

By Edith Hancock

Tech companies could risk breaching European Union copyright laws when their artificial-intelligence chatbots reuse news articles to generate answers, a top advisor to the bloc's highest court said.

EU Court of Justice Advocate General Maciej Szpunar said Tuesday that a publisher's rights could be infringed when chatbots retrieve and reuse material from online publications to generate answers to user queries under certain circumstances.

The statement comes after Hungarian digital publisher Like Company challenged Google over its Gemini chatbot service in a domestic court, arguing that the search giant used copyrighted articles to train large language models and repeatedly reproduced them through Gemini between June 2023 and May 2024. Judges in Hungary then turned to the ECJ in Luxembourg for guidance.

"We acknowledge the Advocate General's opinion recognising that EU law permits AI training on publicly available information," a Google spokesperson said. "Gemini learns linguistic patterns to create original outputs rather than replicating content," they said, adding that rights-holders have the ability to opt out of its AI features.

"The press publisher's right does not protect the mere facts reported in press publications, but only the specific form of expression of those publications," the ECJ said in a statement Tuesday.

The court advisor said such cases should focus on whether a chatbot accessed articles unlawfully--such as by getting around a paywall--and whether an answer only reports facts from the article or reuses a publication's form of expression "to such an extent that the user, by reading that answer, is entirely dispensed from accessing the original publication."

The advocate general's recommendation isn't binding. It is now up to judges in Hungary to issue a verdict at a later date.

Szpunar said there is no evidence that Like Company's articles have been used to train Gemini's models and that they can be trained using copyrighted material under EU law, according to the Luxembourg court.

News Corp, owner of The Wall Street Journal, has a commercial agreement to supply content on Google platforms.

Write to Edith Hancock at edith.hancock@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

November 03, 2026 10:50 ET (15:50 GMT)