After Chatgpt was launched in 2022, generative artificial intelligence (ai) quickly came to be seen as an existential threat to the search business of Google, owned by Alphabet. It has turned out to be the firm’s saviour—at least in one sense. On September 2nd Amit Mehta, a federal judge who last year declared Google an illegal monopolist, rejected the government’s demand that the search giant be torn apart, and delivered it the gentlest of punishments. The reason was ai. It “changed the course of this case”, he said.
