Johannes von Cramon

Two weeks ago, the Landgericht München I ruled that Google’s AI Overviews constitute Google’s own content. The decision classifies Google as “unmittelbarer Störer,” a direct infringer, and strips away the liability shield that protects traditional search engines from third-party content claims. Google can no longer argue it simply aggregates what others wrote. This could be a big deal.

In the first four months of 2026, 68 percent of Google searches ended without a click. AI Overviews now run on more than 20 percent of searches and cut clicks by nearly 60 percent when they appear.

Not every jurisdiction sees it this way, however. In Walters v. OpenAI (Georgia, 2025), a defamation claim was dismissed after the court found that no reasonable person would treat a chatbot response as fact. Google’s legal team likely expected the same logic to prevail in Munich. It did not.

It is worth noting that an appeal remains open, but it signals that at least some courts may treat AI-generated summaries differently than search results going forward.

David Pierce, writing for The Verge:

Still, there is something about Shortcuts that feels like a model for implementing AI. It’s not flashy or overwrought, and it’s not AI as an entirely new revolutionary interface that will change how you do everything forever and just trust me bro AI is the new UI. It’s not trying to be creative or proactive, it’s there to do what AI actually does well: figure out what you’re asking for and navigate the databases to try and make it happen.

These natural-language shortcuts are effectively just vibe-coding projects, which is slightly ironic, given Apple’s apparently hostile stance toward the vibe-coding apps on its platform. But rather than let you vibe-code an app, Apple’s just letting you vibe-code your phone. You tell it how you’d like it to work, and it sets out to make it happen. And because Apple has unique access to everything from your location to your app logins, it can do so in a vastly more powerful way.

I disagree on the vibe-coding part. Apple built this on App Intents, the framework developers already use to connect their app workflows with Siri. The AI layer sits on top and translates plain-English requests into structured calls that the system already knows how to execute. That constraint is a feature, not a bug, because the model cannot hallucinate an action that App Intents doesn’t support.

AI with a defined scope might prove more useful to us than AI promising to replace every interface we have.

Apple released a major update to its Foundation Model Framework (FMF) which enables app developers to integrate advanced AI models in 3 ways:

• Apple’s smaller on-device models
• Apple’s larger models in the privacy-safe PCC environment
• Routing to the externally hosted Claude or Gemini models

But the latter needs consent, which will disincentivize their usage due to possible low opt-in rates.

Eric Seufert speculated back in February that it could also be a monetization opportunity for Apple:

A more pertinent question is, perhaps: if Apple is able to dissuade developers from utilizing third-party AI services through the consent requirement, but accessing models hosted via PCC does not require consent, will Apple be able to charge a revenue share for “default AI status” at some point, as it does with default search engine status in Safari?

Put another way: if the only way to host a model in PCC is to enter into some sort of partnership with Apple, could Apple charge a revenue share on API-based token usage for the frontier models it allows into its PCC environment? Apple currently pays Google for the privilege of using Gemini, but I imagine that it’d prefer that money flow in the other direction. Apple may be setting the stage for a revenue opportunity in in-app AI usage by creating a consent distinction between models hosted via PCC through a partnership with Apple and those that aren’t.

This approach differs from five years ago when Apple only destroyed the market value of Meta and other ad networks by introducing ATT.

While they also provided publishers with a workaround around SKAN limitations by using their own ASA network, they did not secure the majority of marketing budgets because ASA was (and still is) challenging to scale in most categories.

Perhaps Apple can capitalize on its gatekeeper position more effectively this time.

Not much is new for app marketers from this year’s WWDC. However, Apple will finally follow Meta’s and Google’s lead and allow us to upload our own creatives for Apple Ads. Independent of the App Store product page:

• Images and videos must use a 3:2 aspect ratio.

• Videos must be between 5-30 seconds in length and can only be used in search results ads.

• Videos can be uploaded with or without audio, but audio will not play.

• Images and videos can include embedded text, and you can localize the text according to the countries and regions where your ads will run.

As always, Apple’s guidelines on this are quite vague. It remains to be seen how far marketers will push the limits, as Apple stays very protective of the content shown in its App Store.

Ed Elson on his newsletter Simply Put:

For years, stock prices have remained elevated, partly due to unusually low supply. The IPO market essentially collapsed after COVID. The number of public companies is half what it was 30 years ago.

This made investing quite easy, as all you had to do was keep investing in the companies that already existed. (Read: Big Tech.) The virtuous cycle of low supply and high demand drove the price of tech stocks ever higher, making them, on a risk-adjusted basis, arguably the greatest asset class in history.

But that’s all about to change, and violently so. SpaceX, Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google are about to inject roughly $350 billion of new equity into the market. That’s more money than the entire US venture capital industry invested last year, and more than was raised in IPOs over the past seven years combined. And that’s just four companies.⁠⁠

He presents a compelling argument suggesting that the stock market could enter a downturn due to investors rushing to buy these mega IPOs while withdrawing their money from other companies because they lack the necessary liquidity.

And he’s not wrong, as this has indeed happened in the past with the Xerox or Apple IPO, although with little to no long-term impact.