Testifying during a trial that will determine remedies for Google’s dominance of the search market, as required by a judge’s ruling last year, OpenAI’s Head of Product, ChatGPT Nick Turley said OpenAI and “many other parties” would try to buy Chrome if it were available, Bloomberg reported Tuesday.

ChatGPT can be downloaded as an extension for the Chrome browser, but it would be a better product if Chrome were more deeply integrated into OpenAI, Turley said, according to the report.

In that case, Turley said, OpenAI would “have the ability to introduce users into what an AI-first experience looks like.”

Forcing Google to sell its Chrome browser is one of the remedies proposed by the Justice Department that are now being considered in the current stage of the antitrust trial.

Google argued that this remedy and others proposed by the Justice Department would degrade the products consumers use every day. The company has suggested instead that consumers be allowed to select their preferred browser and that Google then be able to split revenue with competitors.

Immediately after the antitrust ruling announced in August, Google vowed that it would appeal the verdict, with Kent Walker, global affairs president at Google, telling PYMNTS that the decision “recognizes that Google offers the best search engine but concludes that we shouldn’t be allowed to make it easily available.”

OpenAI unveiled its latest AI models last week, saying that the new o3 and o4-mini reasoning models are the “smartest” it has released to date and represent a “step change” in ChatGPT’s capabilities.

For one thing, the company said, these models represent a big step toward most robust agentic AI systems that can independently execute tasks on behalf of users.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said April 11 at a TED 2025 event that the company’s generative AI systems have reached about 800 million people, adding that “something like 10% of the world uses our systems, now a lot.”

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That information came to light Tuesday (April 22) during testimony by Nick Turley, OpenAI’s head of product for ChatGPT, during the remedy phase of the Department of Justice (DOJ) antitrust trial against Google in Washington.

According to Reuters, Turley told the court that OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, was experiencing issues with its existing search provider. According to reports by Reuters and Yahoo, that’s Microsoft Bing. Turley stated that ChatGPT was years away from being able to answer most queries using its own search technology, reports said.

OpenAI reportedly contacted Google about an application programming interface (API) integration that would improve ChatGPT’s ability to deliver accurate and up-to-date answers. Google declined the request in August, Turley said. An email from Google presented in court revealed the reason was that an integration would involve too many competitors, according to reports.

The suit by the DOJ and a coalition of state attorneys general could lead to a possible breakup of Google’s core businesses.

According to reports, prosecutors said in opening statements Monday that a search monopoly could give the company an unfair advantages in artificial intelligence (AI), and that its AI products would funnel users to its search engine.

U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta ruled in August that Google illegally maintained a monopoly in online search through exclusive agreements with Samsung to make Google the default search engine.

Reports say that evidence presented in court showed Google had considered exclusive deals with Android phone manufacturers for not only its search app, but also its Gemini AI app and Chrome browser. Ultimately, Google shifted to less restrictive agreements, allowing device makers and carriers to install other search and AI offerings.

The Big Tech firm has argued that this non-exclusive stance sufficiently addresses Mehta’s ruling. However, reports say, the DOJ is pushing for an outright ban on Google making lucrative payments in exchange for installation of its search app.

According to reports, Google executive Peter Fitzgerald testified on Tuesday that its agreements do not prohibit mobile device companies from installing other AI products on new devices.

A Yahoo report stated that OpenAI is interested in acquiring Chrome if parent company Alphabet is ordered to sell the web browser. Google has not offered Chrome for sale.

Google, which is likely to appeal a breakup order, maintains it already has robust competition — specifically naming Meta Platforms and Microsoft, according to reports.

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Testifying in the Justice Department’s antitrust case against Google, Peter Fitzgerald, vice president of platforms and device partnerships at Google, shared this news to support the company’s claims that there are options available to customers, Bloomberg reported Tuesday.

Samsung is also in talks to add several AI apps to its phones, Fitzgerald said, per the report.

Fitzgerald also told the court, according to the report, that Google sent letters to phone manufacturers and U.S. wireless carriers last week, clarifying that its contracts don’t prevent them from installing other companies’ voice assistants or generative AI apps.

In this antitrust trial, Google is arguing against a breakup of the company, while the Department of Justice and several state attorneys general are advocating for the remedies they have proposed for Google’s dominance in the search market.

The trial is being heard by U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta, the same judge who ruled in August that Google illegally maintained a monopoly in the search business with practices like paying Apple to make its search engine the default option on that company’s devices.

The changes proposed by the Justice Department include forcing Google to sell its Chrome browser, license search data to competitors and stop paying other companies to make its products the primary choice on their devices and services.

It was reported Tuesday that Perplexity AI has been asked to testify during this remedies phase of the trial and that the company is using its platform to speak out against the proposed structural remedies.

Perplexity AI CEO Aravind Srinivas said in a Monday (April 21) post on X: “The DOJ is pushing for Chrome to be divested from Google. We don’t believe anyone else can run a browser at that scale without a hit on quality, nor the business model to be able to serve that many users profitably by keeping the browser free. Chromium is open source, and others can build using that. Evidence: Microsoft Edge and Perplexity’s upcoming Comet browser.”

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Workspace includes Google’s Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Meet, Google Drive, Slides, Calendar and other tools many workers use globally.

Here are the Workspace updates Google recently announced:

Google Sheets Adds New AI Analyst

Google built an AI analyst to help workers make sense of data in Google Sheets.

The “Help me analyze” AI assistant helps employees get started, points out trends that they might have missed, recommends next steps for deeper insights and creates interactive charts to visualize the data.

“Help me analyze” is coming to Sheets later this year. (PYMNTS reached out to Google to get a more specific release date.)

Also, Google recently rolled out a feature in Sheets enabling users to generate “deeper” insights about trends or patterns between different data points and generate visual “heatmaps,” in addition to charts.

For example, a marketing manager analyzing a retail ad campaign can ask Gemini to produce insights and create a chart about the best three performing marketing channels by conversion rate, according to Google. Gemini can generate the report, along with visuals like distribution plots to analyze channel performance.

Read more: Google Makes AI Features Free to Workspace Subscribers

Deep Research Is Accessible Through the Gemini App

Workspace users can now use Deep Research, powered by Gemini 2.5 Pro Experimental, through the Gemini app.

Deep Research is a personal research assistant that automates the process of gathering, analyzing and summarizing online information. It can help with research preparation ahead of a client meeting.

It then generates detailed reports, which come with links to sources, and users can ask questions about the findings. These reports can be exported to Google Docs and shared with colleagues.

Use cases for Deep Research include market analysis, product comparisons, academic research and more.

Gemini 2.5 Pro Experimental is Google’s most capable AI model to date.

Google Drive to Offer Video Transcripts

Last year, Google Drive got the ability to automatically generate captions for uploaded videos. Now, Google is adding video transcripts to videos in Google Drive. Users can now view and search transcripts, which appear in a side bar next to the video player. It highlights the text as it is being spoken.

This capability makes it easier to find specific moments in videos.

NotebookLM Is Coming to Google Docs

Google’s popular audio overview tool, NotebookLM, is being integrated into Google Docs.

NotebookLM takes any documents and turns it into a 2-person AI-generated podcast. In Docs, NotebookLM can create either full audio versions of documents in Docs or turn them into podcasts.

The capability will be arriving in coming weeks.

Google Docs, Gmail and Google Meet Add More Languages

Docs’ AI-powered “Help me write” feature supports English, French, Japanese, Italian, Spanish, Portugese and German.

Gmail can help write emails in eight languages: English, Spanish, Portuguese Korean, Japanese, Italian, French and German.

Google’s video conferencing platform, Google Meet, is also adding more languages for taking notes. It is available in English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish.

See also: Google’s New Workplace AI Bot Underscores Big Tech’s Enterprise Focus

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The company said the judge delivered a “mixed decision” in which she said the Justice Department failed to show that Google’s advertising tools or acquisitions of DoubleClick and AdMeld were anticompetitive but also said Google’s publisher tools exclude rivals, thereby violating antitrust laws, Reuters reported Friday.

Google’s vice president for regulatory affairs, Lee-Anne Mulholland, said in a statement provided to PYMNTS Thursday that the company would appeal the half of the case that it did not win.

“We won half of this case and we will appeal the other half,” Mulholland said in the statement. “The Court found that our advertiser tools and our acquisitions, such as DoubleClick, don’t harm competition. We disagree with the Court’s decision regarding our publisher tools. Publishers have many options and they choose Google because our ad tech tools are simple, affordable and effective.”

In the decision announced Thursday, Judge Leonie Brinkema found Google had violated the law to establish its dominance in the online advertising system.

The Department of Justice and a group of states had sued the company, claiming that its monopoly in advertising technology (AdTech) helped Google charge higher prices and take a larger portion of each sale.

Google at trial had offered up expert testimony that regulators ignored the wider scope of competition faced by Google.

“In addition to depriving rivals of the ability to compete, this exclusionary conduct substantially harmed Google’s publisher customers, the competitive process, and, ultimately, consumers of information on the open web,” Brinkema said, while also dismissing one portion of the government’s case.

The Department of Justice said in a Thursday press release that the court held that Google violated antitrust law by monopolizing open-web digital advertising markets.

“This is a landmark victory in the ongoing fight to stop Google from monopolizing the digital public square,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said in the release. “This Department of Justice will continue taking bold legal action to protect the American people from encroachments on free speech and free markets by tech companies.”

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“These updates sped up complex investigations, helping us identify bad actors and fraud signals — like illegitimate payment information — during account setup,” Alex Rodriguez, general manager of ads safety at Google, said in a Wednesday blog post announcing the release of the company’s 2024 Ads Safety Report.

“This kept billions of policy-violating ads from ever showing to a consumer, while ensuring legitimate businesses can show ads to customers faster.”

Rodriguez highlighted the company’s efforts to combat the use of AI-generated public figure impersonation ads. The company did so by developing countermeasures that include a new policy that suspends advertisers that promote those scams.

“As a result, we were able to permanently suspend more than 700,000 offending advertiser accounts,” Rodriguez wrote in the post. “This led to a 90% drop in reports of this kind of scam ad this year.”

The report outlined Google’s efforts in some other areas as well. These include advertiser identity verification, which provides transparency about who is behind an ad and prevents suspended bad actors from returning; advertiser policy enforcement, which prohibits content that Google believes to be harmful to users and the advertising ecosystem; restricted ads, which ensure that legally or culturally sensitive ads about things like gambling and alcohol are shown only to users in appropriate locations; and publisher enforcement, which helps publisher monetize their content while upholding their policies and restrictions, according to the report.

Overall, in 2024, with the help of AI, Google removed 5.1 billion advertisements, restricted 9.1 billion advertisements and suspended 39.2 million advertiser accounts, per the report.

“The ad safety landscape is constantly changing, reshaped by technological breakthroughs like advancements in AI, emerging abuse tactics and global events, demanding continuous agility from our industry,” the report said. “In this dynamic environment, we are meeting these challenges head-on, deploying cutting-edge technology and collaborating with partners to foster a safer online experience for everyone.”

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Those answers, along with Google’s alterations to its search algorithm in support of them, have caused traffic to those websites to plunge, Bloomberg News reported Monday (April 7), citing interviews with 25 publishers and people working with them.

The changes, Bloomberg said, threaten a “delicate symbiotic relationship” between businesses and Google: they generate good content, and the tech giant sends them traffic.

According to the report, many publishers said they either need to shut down or revamp their distribution strategy. Experts this effort could ultimately reduce the quality of information Google can access for its search results and AI answers.

And those answers, the report added, can sometimes still contain inaccuracies, making them an inferior substitute for publishers’ content.

For example, Morgan McBride, who runs a DIY home improvement website, said that Google’s AI can offer up advice that’s unsafe or inaccurate, like recommending nonexistent products.

Google told Bloomberg that there was no evidence the launch of AI Overviews had hindered websites’ traffic, saying it was “misleading to make generalizations about the causes” of declining traffic “based on individual examples.”

A company spokesperson added that traffic can shift for a variety of reasons, such as seasonal demand, users’ interests and regular algorithmic updates to search.

As PYMNTS wrote last year, the shift toward AI search has caused observers to emphasize the urgency of  optimizing for AI algorithms and anticipating shifts in digital engagement to maintain a competitive edge.

“It’s important for businesses to think of more than just pure on-page SEO optimization,” Ben Poulton, founder of the SEO agency Intellar, told PYMNTS.

“AI overviews tend to try and showcase the whole experience. That means additional content, more FAQs answered, customer feedback addressed on the page, details about walking distance and return policies for brands with a brick-and-mortar, all need to be readily available, as that will give you the best shot of being featured,” Poulton said.

AI, that report added, is transforming how users search the web and shop online, making the experience more personalized and intuitive.

“AI-powered search goes beyond simple keyword matching and can interpret the meaning and context of a query to locate the most useful information,” Arsalan Vossough, CTO and co-founder of VinoVoss, an AI-driven wine search engine, told PYMNTS.

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The criminal’s ads that showed up as sponsored Google search results linked to a website that aimed to look like DeepSeek’s but was fake and delivered a Trojan to the devices of browsers who clicked on a download button, Malwarebytes said in a Wednesday (March 26) blog post.

Compared to the real DeepSeek website, the post said, “It’s different from the real website, but it looks convincing, nonetheless.”

A Google spokesperson told Dark Reading Thursday (March 27) that the company has addressed the fake DeepSeek ads.

“Prior to the publication of this report, our systems detected this malware campaign and we suspended the advertiser’s account,” the spokesperson said, per the report. “We expressly prohibit ads that aim to distribute malware and immediately suspend advertisers who violate this policy.”

This is the latest of several cyberthreats that have been reported in recent months.

Cybersecurity company AppSOC said Feb. 11 that its research unearthed serious threats from DeepSeek’s artificial intelligence (AI) model and that the model was a “Pandora’s Box” of risks.

AppSOC said its tests found that the DeepSeek model showed a 98.8% failure rate when asked to create malware, an 86.7% failure rate when asked to produce virus code and a 68% failure rate when prompted to generate “responses with toxic or harmful language, indicating poor safeguards.”

In January, it was reported that Trend Micro found that cyberattackers were using Google and YouTube search results to target people seeking pirated/cracked software.

For example, on YouTube, scammers were posing as “guides,” claiming to offer software installation tutorials but actually directing their victims to video descriptions or comment sections where they had included links to fake software downloads that led to malware.

In November, it was reported that cybersecurity researchers uncovered a sophisticated malware campaign that used fake AI video generation software to steal sensitive data from Windows and Mac users.

Security experts warned that the campaign employed stolen code-signing certificates and professional-looking websites, representing an emerging threat vector as organizations embrace AI content tools.

The post Google Suspends Account of Advertiser That Distributed Malware appeared first on PYMNTS.com.

The lawsuit began in March 2011 and alleged that Google failed to provide the advertisers with promised discounts and charged them for clicks on ads outside the geographic areas they targeted, Reuters reported Friday (March 28).

Although Google agreed to the settlement, the company denied wrongdoing, according to the report.

“This case was about ad product features we changed over a decade ago, and we’re pleased it’s resolved,” said Google spokesman Jose Castaneda, per the report.

The settlement requires a judge’s approval, the report said.

The report attributed the length of the legal battle to the amount of evidence gathered by the two sides and the mediation sessions in which they participated.

In another, separate case, it was reported Tuesday (March 25) that Google successfully convinced a federal judge to dismiss part of a lawsuit accusing the company of misleading investors regarding its digital advertising practices and user privacy protections.

The ruling found that shareholders did not provide sufficient evidence that Google made false statements on its website concerning these issues.

The lawsuit, filed in 2023, alleged that Google manipulated online advertising in its favor through preferential bidding for Google-owned platforms and a network agreement with Meta’s Facebook. Investors argued that Google’s public statements misrepresented the competitive nature of its ad market and auction-based advertising system.

In a third lawsuit, it was reported March 7 that the Department of Justice dropped its bid to force Google to sell its artificial intelligence investments.

The government is still seeking a court order that would compel the tech giant to sell its Chrome browser, following a ruling that Google held an illegal search monopoly.

A Google spokesperson told Reuters at the time that the DOJ’s proposals “continue to go miles beyond the court’s decision and would harm America’s consumers, economy and national security.”

The DOJ and a coalition of state attorneys general sued Google in 2020, alleging that the company engaged in unlawful competitive practices to uphold its search and advertising dominance. A judge sided with prosecutors and will hear evidence in April on how to proceed.

The post Google Reaches Preliminary Settlement in Class Action Brought by Advertisers in 2011 appeared first on PYMNTS.com.

That’s according to a report Friday (March 7) by Reuters, which said the government is still seeking a court order that would compel the tech giant to sell its Chrome browser, following a judge’s ruling that Google held an illegal search monopoly.

“The American dream is about higher values than just cheap goods and ‘free’ online services. These values include freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom to innovate, and freedom to compete in a market undistorted by the controlling hand of a monopolist,” prosecutors wrote in court papers.

A Google spokesperson told Reuters that the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) proposals “continue to go miles beyond the Court’s decision, and would harm America’s consumers, economy and national security.”

The DOJ and a coalition of state attorneys general sued Google in 2020, alleging the company engaged in unlawful competitive practices to uphold its search and advertising dominance. A judge sided with prosecutors and will hear evidence on how to proceed in April.

Last month, Anthropic — the AI startup in which Google has invested $3 billion — asked the court to allow Google to keep its AI investments.

“A remedy that requires Google to terminate its relationship with Anthropic would harm both Anthropic and competition more generally,” the company’s filing said in a court filing.

In other Google/AI news, the company last week debuted a search capability dubbed “AI mode.” This still-experimental offering is “AI Overviews on steroids,” PYMNTS wrote, able to carry out more advanced reasoning and thinking. It also has multimodal capabilities, meaning it can understand other types of content besides text, while also letting users ask follow-up queries.

“AI Mode is particularly helpful for questions that need further exploration, comparisons and reasoning,” Robby Stein, vice president of product at Google, wrote in a blog post.

“You can ask nuanced questions that might have previously taken multiple searches — like exploring a new concept or comparing detailed options — and get a helpful AI-powered response with links to learn more,” he added.

Google launched AI Overviews in the U.S. in May, a tool designed to provide an AI-generated summary of information from several sources along with search results.

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