EU top court: Advocate General issues opinion in AI copyright case, written text not yet public

The European Union’s top court on Tuesday announced that Advocate General Maciej Szpunar has delivered an opinion in a closely watched copyright case over artificial intelligence, Case C-250/25, Like Company v Google Ireland Limited, which asks whether a chatbot’s retrieval and reuse of press content can infringe EU law. But as of 09:25 UTC, the full written opinion was not publicly retrievable on the court’s CURIA or EUR-Lex registers, meaning the announcement could be reported but not the advocate general’s conclusions.

The official Court of Justice of the European Union account on Bluesky posted at 09:21:15.977 UTC: “#AG Szpunar: Opinion in Case C-250/25.”

The case is a request for a preliminary ruling from the Budapest District Court in Hungary. It pits Like Company, a Hungarian press publisher, against Google Ireland over Google’s Gemini chatbot, formerly known as Bard. At its core are questions about whether a chatbot’s display of text partly identical to material on a press publisher’s website can amount to “reproduction” or “communication to the public” under EU copyright rules.

According to the CJEU’s case summary, the Hungarian court also asked whether training the large language model itself amounts to an act of reproduction, and whether the European Union’s text-and-data-mining exception in the DSM Directive can apply.

Those questions go to the scope of rights that EU law gives press publishers over online uses of their publications. Article 15(1) of the DSM Directive grants press publishers certain protections built on copyright rights recognized in the EU’s InfoSoc Directive, including the right to control reproduction and the act of making works available or communicating them to the public. In simpler terms, the court has been asked to examine both the alleged reuse of press content in chatbot outputs and the earlier copying that may occur when an AI model is trained.

The referral was lodged on April 3, 2025. The case then moved unusually quickly onto the court’s higher-profile track: a Grand Chamber hearing took place on March 10, 2026. The CJEU’s judicial calendar had listed delivery of Szpunar’s opinion for Nov. 3, 2026, in the court’s 09:30 session.

The dispute has drawn attention because legal commentators have described it as one of the EU’s first major cases at the Court of Justice squarely addressing generative AI training and outputs. Any eventual judgment from the Luxembourg-based court would be authoritative across the European Union’s member states.

For now, however, Tuesday’s development is procedural as much as substantive. The court has announced that Szpunar’s opinion exists, but without the public text there is no verified basis to report his reasoning or whether he recommended that the court favor Like Company or Google Ireland.

That leaves the significance of the moment clear enough on its own: the EU’s highest court has reached another key stage in a landmark AI-copyright dispute over Gemini and press content. But readers, publishers and AI companies alike will need the published opinion itself before they can assess what Szpunar actually said about “reproduction,” “communication to the public,” model training or the DSM Directive exception.