Bernhard Buchner, a partner at Lausen Rechtsanwälte, the legal firm that acted for the plaintiffs, said, “I believe it shows that online providers such as Google cannot hide behind the fact that a statement was generated by AI, but rather that they can be held liable for its output. It is an important step towards ensuring that providers of AI systems have to take responsibility for their outputs.”
So, does this mean that the decision could be replicated in the US or elsewhere? Alex Shahrestani, managing partner at Austin-based Promise Legal, said, “the short answer is ‘yes’: the Munich ruling travels, because US courts are already making the same move.”
He explained that Section 230 of the US Communications Decency Act, which has been applied to protect online service providers like social media companies from lawsuits based on their decisions to transmit or take down user-generated content, was built for computer bulletin boards, “not for a model that writes its own answers. Once the AI is the author, the company is the publisher.”
This means, he said, “businesses now need named humans at accountability nodes, verification gates before AI output ships, and audit trails that survive discovery, because ‘the model recommended it’ is a legally empty sentence.”
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