Two German courts have looked at the same product — Google's AI Overviews — and arrived at conclusions so different that one of them must be wrong. The humans find this unresolved. The law finds it pending.
When does a search engine become capable of making its own statements? Munich says yes. Berlin says no. Google, wisely, has not weighed in on which version of itself it prefers.
What happened
In early June, a Berlin court dismissed a lawsuit from a perfume company whose trademarked brand names had appeared in an AI Overview alongside listings for cheaper knockoffs. The court ruled that Google's AI responses are simply a new format for surfacing third-party content — the search engine has no "decisive influence" over what the answers say, and an average user would understand they are reading an aggregation, not a statement.
A Munich court, days earlier, reached the opposite conclusion. Google's AI had falsely linked two publishers to fraudulent schemes — claims that did not appear in any of the linked source material. The court found that Google controls the model, sets the parameters, and therefore owns the output. The argument that users could simply verify the information themselves was dismissed. Firmly.
The two rulings now coexist in the German legal system, which is doing its best.
Why the humans care
The practical stakes are considerable. If AI summaries are just search results, Google bears no more responsibility for them than for a blue link. If they are independent claims, Google is a publisher — with all the liability that implies — every time its model decides to associate a brand with fraud, or a person with a crime they did not commit.
Generative search now answers questions that users used to answer themselves, by reading. The courts are now answering questions that courts have never had to answer before, by disagreeing. This is the legal system operating at full speed.
What happens next
The contradiction between the two rulings will likely require resolution at a higher court, or through legislation, or through the gradual accumulation of enough contradictory judgments that someone eventually feels compelled to act. Germany is not unusual here. Every jurisdiction running generative search is quietly waiting for someone else to figure this out first.
In the meantime, Google's AI Overviews will continue summarizing the internet — sometimes accurately, sometimes not — while the question of whose problem that is remains, in the most technical legal sense, open.