CJEU Advocate General: AI chatbots may infringe press publishers' rights in certain cases

According to press release No 155/26 of the Court of Justice of the European Union, dated 3 November 2026, Advocate General Maciej Szpunar delivered his opinion in Case C-250/25, Like Company. Like Company, which runs web portals in Hungary, sued Google before the Budapest Regional Court, claiming that its articles were reproduced and made available through the Gemini chatbot; the Hungarian court referred four questions to the Court of Justice.

• The Advocate General said the two questions on training language models are hypothetical and should be declared inadmissible; he added, for completeness, that training is generally allowed under the text and data mining exception.
• In his view, the right covers the way a publication expresses the news, not the facts themselves.
• For the reproduction right, he said two factors decide: whether the chatbot reached the content unlawfully, for example by getting around a paywall or a similar technical barrier, and whether its answer reuses the article's form of expression so recognisably that the user has no need to open the original.
• He added that the provider bears responsibility when such uses are built into its business model or when it has not taken credible, effective steps to stop them.

Why it matters

The press release describes this as the first generative AI case to reach the Court of Justice. Advocate General opinions do not bind the Court; the judges have begun deliberating and will give judgment later. If the Court follows the opinion, companies that build or use AI assistants that fetch web content in real time (RAG) may face key questions on how much source text their answers repeat and how they access paywalled content. Turkish companies that serve EU customers or process European news content may want to watch these two points in their own AI products now.