Google wins dismissal of Chegg and Penske Media lawsuits over AI summaries

Tech giant Google has won the dismissal of lawsuits brought by the education platform Chegg and by the publisher of the magazines Rolling Stone, Billboard and Variety, Penske Media Corp, which accused the company of unlawfully using their content in summaries generated by artificial intelligence, as Reuters reports.

Federal Judge Amit Mehta in Washington ruled on Wednesday that the antitrust claims “can’t even get off the starting line,” according to Reuters reporting. The lawsuits, filed last year, claimed that Google forces publishers to accept the use of their content in AI Overviews if they want to remain indexed in search results — and that falling traffic has caused them revenue losses.

In his ruling, Judge Mehta wrote that the plaintiffs had presented only the “expectation” that Google would send them search traffic in exchange for content provided for free. “But an expectation is not an agreement. It is simply how a general search engine works,” the ruling is quoted as saying, according to Reuters.

Mehta told the plaintiffs that, in a competitive market, Google would pay publishers for republishing content or for using it to train artificial intelligence systems, while Google responded that it has no obligation to index content on publishers’ terms. The judge said he is not “insensitive” to the publishers’ situation, but antitrust laws cannot substitute for lawmakers’ power to regulate this field, Reuters reports.

Google has denied any wrongdoing, while Chegg and Penske Media have not commented on the ruling, according to Reuters. Another judge had dismissed similar claims brought by another publisher in March. The cases — Chegg Inc v. Google LLC (No. 25-cv-543) and Penske Media Corp v. Google (No. 25-cv-3192) — were heard in the federal court of the District of Columbia.