When Does a Chatbot Answer Infringe a News Publisher's Right? Advocate General Szpunar's 3 November 2026 Opinion in Like Company v Google (C-250/25)

What Advocate General Szpunar advised the EU Court of Justice on 3 November 2026

Like Company, a Hungarian operator of news portals, sued Google before the Budapest Regional Court over Gemini's use of its articles between 13 June 2023 and 31 May 2024. The Hungarian court referred four questions to the Court of Justice, two on training a large language model and two on the answers a chatbot gives. In his opinion in Case C-250/25, Advocate General Maciej Szpunar advised the Court to declare the training questions inadmissible, because nothing shows that Like Company's articles trained Gemini and because training is not an "online use" under Article 15 of the 2019 copyright directive.

Which two tests would decide a retrieval-augmented answer

For retrieval-augmented generation, where a chatbot fetches a live web page and uses it to answer, the opinion sets two alternative routes to infringement. One is unlawful access, such as getting around a paywall or a technical block on scraping. The other is an answer that reuses the article's form of expression so recognisably that the reader no longer needs the original. Facts stay free.

Why the opinion matters before the judgment

The opinion does not bind the judges, who have begun deliberating. If the Court follows it, the press publishers' right would bite on retrieval products and leave training to the text-and-data-mining exception and its opt-out.