from the you-said-it dept

Legal systems have always struggled to keep up with rapid technological change, and things are no different in the world of generative AI. There are still relatively few rulings on the new issues that the roll-out of AI-based services is raising. That makes a ground-breaking judgment from a court in Germany particularly important. It concerns the AI Overview that sits at the top of the Google’s search results. The Decoder summarizes the court’s ruling:

The Regional Court of Munich hit Google with a temporary injunction barring the company from spreading false claims about two Munich-based publishers through its AI-generated search overviews (case no. 26 O 869/26). The court classified Google as a direct infringer because the “AI overview” is its own content, not just a list of search results.

Google’s AI overviews had falsely tied two publishing companies to scams, subscription traps, and shady business practices for certain search queries. According to the court, the AI mixed up information about other, genuinely sketchy companies with the plaintiffs and drew connections that didn’t appear in any of the linked sources. The publishers sent Google a cease-and-desist letter, but Google didn’t respond appropriately.

The legal innovation here is that the local German court held Google liable for the content of its AI Overview. Unlike traditional search results, which simply point to external sources of information, Google’s AI Overview made statements that were original, the court said:

Google’s AI overviews work nothing like traditional search results, the court argues. The AI rewrites and judges results “in its own words and according to its own structure,” the ruling says. In the case at hand, for example, it opened with confident claims like “Yes, [company] is known for dubious business practices,” then built its own structure with a summary, red flags for the alleged scam, and tips for users.

The court also found that the AI overview made claims “that are not even made in the search results.” None of the linked sources drew any connection between the plaintiffs and the shady companies the AI mentioned. The court called these “the defendant’s own statements.”

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Google argued that people using its search engine could check the results, but the court dismissed the idea that this was the responsibility of the users. Leaving aside the fact that research from the Pew Research Center last year found that “Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results,” there is also the difficulty of checking statements that have been made up (as in this case), which therefore come with no reference links. The court also dealt with the issue of free speech protection for AI-generated content:

An AI’s opinion is “not the expression of an acquired conviction of the persons expressing it, but the result of an algorithm,” the court wrote.

Offering AI-powered research is “above all an expression of Google’s business activities” and “at most a secondary expression of an interest in being able to freely express one’s opinion and beliefs.”

In a statement given to The Decoder, Google said “We invest deeply in the quality of AI Overviews to ensure that the overwhelming majority of responses provide accurate information, and they are designed to reflect the information that exists on the web.”

Since there is no way to ensure that AI responses are 100% correct, this judgment is a big problem for Google, not least because the company plans to place AI Overviews at the heart of its new AI-saturated search engine, as Techdirt reported recently. Not surprisingly, Google has announced that it will appeal against the ruling, which comes from a local German court. If a higher court upholds the judgment, one solution would be for Google to remove AI Overviews in Germany. That would be messy, but doable. But it’s not clear how other AI companies such as chatbots could do the same, since the AI-generated response generally forms the basis of the whole service. Some might choose to discontinue their operations completely in any jurisdiction that adopts a similar position to the Munich court. That would make the roll-out of international services more difficult.

In a post on his blog, the security guru Bruce Schneier points out that if the ruling stands and is adopted elsewhere, it could have important implications not just for things like Google’s AI Overviews and chatbots, but also for the increasingly popular AI agents:

More generally, liability concerns could mean that many current use cases for agents won’t be commercially viable. Companies may not be able to profitably operate AI lawyers, doctors and media influencers if they are held responsible for what they say and do.

Schneier says that he is “OK with this outcome”:

There’s nothing in the law that requires us to accommodate AI systems if they are fundamentally untrustworthy, just as we don’t need to accommodate untrustworthy human systems. Any company that won’t stand by the statements its agents make—whether human or AI—doesn’t deserve users’ time or money.

Clearly this question of AI and agentic liability requires urgent legal clarification. The German decision should at least help to concentrate people’s minds on the topic.

Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon and on Bluesky.

Filed Under: ai agents, ai overview, algorithm, doctors, free speech, generative ai, germany, influencers, lawyers, liability, links, scams, search, trust

Companies: google, pew research center, the decoder

At a conference last year, Ford CEO Jim Farley said that artificial intelligence is “going to replace literally half of all white-collar workers in the US.” Just last week, Ford executives said that the automaker had quietly rehired more than 350 of what it internally calls “gray beard” engineers over the past three years to help fix the AI quality-control systems that weren’t getting the job done.

Over the last decade, US automakers have cut more than 20,000 jobs, nearly a 20% reduction in workforce between Ford, General Motors and Stellantis combined. While Ford hasn’t said for sure how many of these gray beard rehires were originally fired to make way for AI and how many are simply returning retirees, Farley’s recent statements on automation-fueled worker replacement certainly paint an awkward picture.

Representatives for Ford and the United Auto Workers union did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Not getting the desired results

“Artificial intelligence is a fantastic tool, but it’s only as good as the information you use to train it,” Charles Poon, Ford’s vice-president of vehicle hardware engineering, told reporters last week. “Mistakenly, we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and ingesting the design requirements that we had, that would produce a high-quality product.” 

Kumar Galhotra, Ford chief operating officer, was even more blunt about the realities of AI in manufacturing, saying that Ford had been “relying more and more on automated quality systems and not getting the desired results.”

More than a simple oopsie, automation issues have been costing Ford billions in warranty costs and recalls. A study from iSeeCars, an automotive marketplace and research company, ranked recent Ford models among the most recalled vehicles in the industry. Ford’s statements and the rehiring of experienced workers are essentially an admission that moving too quickly into AI was a big mistake.

Many major corporations in almost every aspect of tech and manufacturing have been naming artificial intelligence as an excuse for large workforce reductions, often without fully accounting for what gets lost when that human factor walks out the door. Entire industries have been crunching the uncomfortable numbers of replacing human judgment with automated systems, with some even backtracking on their decisions when the true cost of AI proves too high. 

What happens now?

Last week, Ford announced that, for the first time in 16 years, it had captured the number one spot among mainstream brands in JD Power’s 2026 Initial Quality Survey, up from tenth last year. The automaker credits the rise, in part, to the contributions of the rehired gray beards. But before you get too excited about the triumph of these modern-day John Henrys over the machines set out to replace them, don’t forget what ultimately happened to that folklore hero: He was still replaced by the steam engine.

Galhotra said the rehired specialists — some former Ford employees, others drawn from industry suppliers — were brought back specifically to “hunt for failure points before a part ever reaches the plant floor.”

Ford isn’t abandoning AI. Instead, the returning gray beards are doing two things: training younger staff who never worked alongside those veterans and helping to rebuild the data pipelines that the AI tools run on. 

Essentially, they’ve been brought back to fix and train the automated software systems that replaced them. Ford also said it has built a dedicated 40-person software quality assurance team and added more than 100,000 AI-powered automated tests to catch edge cases late in development.

Technology marches on.

Ford just happened to learn the lesson loudly enough to become a case study, but I don’t think it will be the last. There may not always be gray beards to call on to save the day.

Wenting Zhang looked at the M5PaperS3 and decided its e-ink screen could do more than display static pages. The compact development board from M5Stack carries an ESP32-S3 processor, a 4.7-inch 960-by-540 e-ink touchscreen, a simple buzzer, and a microSD slot. He turned the whole package into a handheld that runs original Game Boy software at a steady 60 frames per second.

Most e-ink displays are noted for being a little slow. It has a lot to do with how charged particles in the panel take their time drifting into place, thus a full refresh can take hundreds of milliseconds and frequently produces a faint afterimage. Zhang stomped on those physical constraints. He did not simply accept the status quo and dismiss those restrictions as the maximum. Instead, he created a bespoke driver that only works with the display’s low-level parallel interface. This driver holds a super-compact state record for each pixel, with only four bits per dot.

That state buffer receives a new set of image data every sixtieth of a second, while the driver nudges each pixel into place using a series of voltage changes. It’s a clever approach that renders the standard global lock, which requires the entire panel to complete one full cycle before receiving fresh commands, completely obsolete. The Game Boy panels are small (160 by 144 pixels), therefore a crisp threefold upscale with slight dithering is well within the processor’s capabilities. Fortunately, all of the active buffers fit inside the ESP32-S3’s extremely fast internal SRAM.

The two cores on the board function together, with one running the emulator itself. The second core is responsible for processing display updates and sending new data via DMA transfers timed to the vertical sync signal. This preserves the 60 Hz rhythm perfectly on beat even when the emulation workload changes. Zhang tried several Game Boy emulator cores before settling on CrankBoy, an optimized fork of Peanut GB. It provided the best trade-off between speed and compatibility on this hardware. Most games run close to full speed. The system will skip the odd frame to keep the timing just perfect for sound and input in the event of a demanding situation. Unfortunately, Game Boy Color titles remain out of reach for the time being due to their roughly doubled processing demand.

The sound emanates from a single buzzer on the board. Zhang created a rapid-switching scheme that cycles between crude approximations of the four original Game Boy audio channels. The end output is recognized chiptune music rather than exact waveform playback, but it preserves the essence of the games without the need for additional gear. The touchscreen includes all of the controls. The panel’s lower portion displays a Game Boy-style directional pad and various action buttons. Any taps register right away. There is experimental Bluetooth LE gamepad support, although it only works with a limited number of controllers right now.

Saved data is stored on the microSD card, and the hardware power button only cuts power, with no shutdown process (Zhang added a manual save button to the screen). Quick save states add an extra degree of security during lengthy gaming sessions. The entire project’s source code (known as Paper Boy S3 in some places) is now available on GitLab. There’s also a separate proof-of-concept JIT recompiler that another developer worked on, demonstrating one approach to go even faster if someone wants to take it a step further.
[Source]

T-Mobile is asking a New York court to rule that Broadcom was contractually obligated to continue supporting its VMware perpetual licenses.

In its complaint, T-Mobile said it has tens of thousands of virtual machines using VMware software across approximately 303,140 CPU cores. It also said that it was migrating off VMware but noted the time-consuming and technical challenges involved in migrating over 1,000 applications.

It filed its lawsuit, which was first reported by The Register today, in the Supreme Court of the State of New York in August 2025 (PDF).

The mobile company claimed that in 2023, it bought perpetual VMware licenses, plus two years of support with the option to buy a third year. But after Broadcom bought VMware, it stopped sales of VMware perpetual licenses in favor of subscriptions and started bundling VMware products into a few, more expensive bundles.

When T-Mobile tried to extend support for a third year for $5,288,398.45, Broadcom wouldn’t allow it, per an August 2025 filing from T-Mobile. A Broadcom representative reportedly told T-Mobile via email: “Broadcom announced end of available of all perpetual products, which includes Stated Out Year Renewals for perpetual support.”

A judge granted T-Mobile an injunction that allowed it to receive support services from October 2025 through August 3, 2026, for $5.28 million, plus the posting of a $500,000 undertaking.

Now, T-Mobile seeks a declaration that it was entitled to renew support services and further relief as the court deems necessary.

Next spring could be a fiesta of new iPads, MacBooks and iPhones.