BRUSSELS — The European Commission has opened an antitrust investigation into whether Google breached EU competition rules by using the content of web publishers, as well as video uploaded to YouTube, for artificial intelligence purposes.

The investigation will examine whether Google is distorting competition by imposing unfair terms and conditions on publishers and content creators, or by granting itself privileged access to such content, thus placing rival AI models at a disadvantage, the Commission said on Tuesday.

In a statement, the EU executive said it was concerned that Google may have used the content of web publishers to provide generative AI-powered services on its search results pages without appropriate compensation to publishers, and without offering them the possibility to refuse such use of their content.

Further, it said that the U.S. search giant may have used video and other content uploaded on YouTube to train Google’s generative AI models without compensating creators and without offering them the possibility to refuse such use of their content.

The formal antitrust probe follows Google’s rollout of AI-driven search results, which resulted in a drop in traffic to online news sites.

Google was fined nearly €3 billion in September for abusing its dominance in online advertising. It has proposed technical remedies over that penalty, but resisted a call by EU competition chief Teresa Ribera to break itself up.