Google Gives Customers Protection for AI-Linked Copyright Suits

Google LLC will begin providing broad legal protections to customers of its generative AI products whose creations face challenges under copyright law, making it the latest tech giant to take that step.

The indemnity coverage includes copyright claims based on the training data used in Google’s AI models and the output generated by the AI products, according to the company’s Thursday press release detailing its new and existing protections.

“If you are challenged on copyright grounds, we will assume responsibility for the potential legal risks involved,” the company said.

The move to protect customers from intellectual property lawsuits comes after IBM Corp., Microsoft Corp., and Adobe Inc. announced similar legal protections for users of their AI products.

The new indemnity provision covers lawsuits alleging that AI-generated output based on a customer’s prompt infringes a third party’s copyrights. The output policy covers Google’s Duet AI program, which can generate images and text in the Google Workspace environment, as well as a range of other Google Cloud services including search, conversation, and captioning programs.

The company noted that the protection only applies if the customer didn’t intentionally try to infringe the rights of others and are using tools to cite sources.

Google said its third-party intellectual property indemnity provision regarding AI training data isn’t new, but the company wanted to explicitly clarify the issue for customers. It covers any lawsuits against customers claiming that Google’s use of training data for its AI models violates copyright law.