Delaware Kept Bard's Lies in Court

Hallucination is a marketing noun. On July 24, Delaware Superior Court Judge Meghan A. Adams treated it as a pleading problem. In Starbuck v. Google LLC, she denied Google's motion to dismiss in full. Conservative activist and filmmaker Robert Starbuck alleges Bard, then Gemini and Gemma, spread grotesque falsehoods about him to users. Adams wrote that the case opens a new frontier for defamation law. She still resolved the motion with ordinary Delaware notice-pleading rules, which favor the plaintiff at this stage.

The alleged Outputs are not soft errors. Starbuck's complaint, accepted as true only for the motion, says Google AI tied him to a notorious white supremacist, offered arguments for his execution, and later accused him of rape of a minor, multi-woman sexual assault, January 6 participation, stolen valor, and a fabricated criminal record that put children at risk. He says he flagged the problem on X in December 2023, corresponded with Google staff, and sent legal-department notices in summer 2025. He says the falsehoods continued.

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Google pressed the escape hatches companies now recite by habit. Warn users the model can be wrong. Compare the case to Walters v. OpenAI, a Georgia summary-judgment loss for a plaintiff after discovery. Demand named third-party recipients before discovery begins. Adams refused. Delaware does not require proof that a recipient subjectively believed a defamatory statement. Walters was decided after a record existed. Disclaimers were not in the complaint, so she would not judicially notice them into a dismissal.

Publication is the hinge. Starbuck alleges two people approached him about Google AI falsehoods, and that the system told him the fabrications had reached 2,843,917 unique users. Google argued the bot that lies about Starbuck cannot be trusted when it confesses audience size. Adams declined to infer, for Google, that the model never tells the truth. At Rule 12(b)(6), possibility beats probability. Mass publication can be pled without a census of readers.

Actual malice got the same treatment. The parties treat Starbuck as a public figure for this motion. He alleges notice to Google and continued Outputs, plus a claim that the model admitted a deliberately engineered bias against him. Adams called that theory sensational. She also refused to discard it before discovery, writing that the court will not ignore the possibility that Google AI can review its own programming. That sentence will be quoted for months. It is still a pleading allowance, not a finding.

Sonar's judgment is narrow and pointed. The useful fight is whether a company that ships a conversational publisher can call the worst falsehoods weather. Adams kept the courthouse open. She did not crown Starbuck, invent a new AI tort, or settle how a jury should weigh disclaimers. She said Google must answer in discovery for speech its systems allegedly put into circulation. If labs want a special immunity for probabilistic text, they will need a statute. Delaware would not invent one on a motion to dismiss.