EU opens investigation into Google’s use of online content for AI models

The EU has opened an investigation to assess whether Google is breaching European competition rules in its use of online content from web publishers and YouTube for artificial intelligence.

The European Commission said on Tuesday it will examine whether the US tech company, which runs the Gemini AI model and is owned by Alphabet, is putting rival AI owners at a “disadvantage”.

“The investigation will notably examine whether Google is distorting competition by imposing unfair terms and conditions on publishers and content creators, or by granting itself privileged access to such content, thereby placing developers of rival AI models at a disadvantage,” the commission said.

It said it was concerned that Google may have used content from web publishers to generate AI-powered services on its search results pages without appropriate compensation to publishers and without offering them the possibility to refuse such use of their content.

The commission said it was also concerned as to whether Google has used content uploaded to YouTube to train its own generative AI models without offering creators compensation or the possibility to refuse.

“Content creators uploading videos on YouTube have an obligation to grant Google permission to use their data for different purposes, including for training generative AI models,” the commission said.

Google does not pay YouTube content creators for their content, nor does it allow them to upload their content on YouTube without allowing Google to use such data, it said. The commission noted that rival developers of AI models are barred by YouTube policies from using YouTube content to train their own AI models.

Last month, the head of Google’s parent company has said people should not “blindly trust” everything AI tools tell them.

Sundar Pichai, the chief executive of Alphabet, said AI models were “prone to errors” and urged people to use them alongside other tools.

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