The Aachen case involved a neuroradiology professor and former chief physician whose departure from his post was explained by Google's AI Mode with an invented scandal: an alleged sexual assault against his secretary, complete with a fabricated legal aftermath. The AI had taken events involving a different former university professor and pinned them on him, a mix-up the court could verify from its own records because the real criminal case had been brought against someone else. The doctor described the errors in detail in late August and asked Google by email to remove the content; after Google said in mid-September it would take no action, a formal legal demand sent the same day also went nowhere, and according to the court the false texts were still live.

The court granted an emergency injunction without hearing Google first, citing the serious risk to the doctor's professional reputation, and violations of the order carry fines of up to 250,000 euros each. Its reasoning mirrors Munich's: Google's AI produces "independent, new, and substantive statements" rather than simply making third-party content findable, so Google answers for them. The judges added that Google could check its AI output against the source websites it used, and that had the company confronted its own AI with the doctor's objections, the system would have caught the errors itself.

There is a wrinkle: the Munich ruling's test never came. Google publicly announced an appeal, but as The Decoder has learned, the case ended in a settlement and no higher court ever weighed in on the reasoning. Why Google settled, and whether money changed hands, is unknown; neither Google nor the publisher commented. If German courts keep treating the company as a publisher of false AI statements while Google resolves cases through likely financial settlements, that leaves the underlying legal question untested and the risk for a feature that constantly generates new answers hard to quantify.