EU Advocate General: no evidence Google trained on publisher's articles, LLM training generally covered by TDM exception

technollama · x · 2026-11-03

The Advocate General's opinion in Like Company v Google (press release only; full opinion pending) brings two key takeaways:

No evidence that Google used Like Company's articles to train the Gemini LLMs, so the two questions on LLM training were deemed hypothetical and inadmissible;
In its hypothetical analysis, AG Szpunar suggests that using copyright-protected works to train an LLM is, as a rule, freely permitted under the text and data mining (TDM) exception, framing training under Article 4 rather than as an 'online use' of press publications.

Legal scholar Technollama reads the opinion — which rests on the communication-to-the-public doctrine — as broadly favorable to AI training, potentially settling the debate over whether training counts as an online use of press publications; a full comment awaits the complete text.

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EU Advocate General: no evidence Google trained on publisher's articles, LLM training generally covered by TDM exception

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