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What Changed
Risk factors · Feb 5, 2025 → Feb 5, 2026
81 added · 84 removed between the two most recent 10-Ks. The risks a company starts — or stops — disclosing are often the story.
Newly disclosed
For example, with the rise of AI in recent years, we have increasingly focused our investments in building powerful AI tools and AI enhancements to our existing products and services to better cater to our users, customers, and other partners.
In 2025, state legislatures considered more than 1,000 AI-related bills, including on fundamental model research and development, synthetic media, algorithmic decision-making, and many others, and took a variety of approaches to AI regulation.
For instance, in 2025, California and New York passed the Transparency in Frontier Artificial Intelligence Act and the Responsible AI Safety and Education Act, respectively, each of which imposes safety and reporting obligations on developers of frontier models.
Furthermore, in December 2020, a number of state Attorneys General, led by the Texas Attorney General, filed a lawsuit in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas concerning our advertising technology and our compliance with US antitrust laws and other laws.
For example, the DOJ and a number of state Attorneys General filed a lawsuit concerning our Search and Search advertising practices and our compliance with US antitrust laws.
For example, energy supply is constrained globally due to the significant increase in demand for and limited availability of energy to power AI compute.
The investments that we are making across our businesses — such as building AI-optimized infrastructure, including our custom TPUs, and integrating AI capabilities into new and existing products and services — reflect our ongoing efforts to innovate and provide products and services that are helpful to users, advertisers, publishers, customers, content providers, and distribution partners.
To meet the compute capacity demands of AI training and inference, as well as traditional cloud computing services, we are entering into significant leasing arrangements with third party operators, which may increase costs and operational complexity.
Table of Contents Alphabet Inc. • Data privacy, collection, processing, and portability: Laws and regulations further restricting the collection, processing, or sharing of user or advertising-related data, including privacy and data protection laws; laws affecting the processing of children's data (as discussed further below), data breach notification laws; laws limiting data transfers (including data localization laws); laws limiting use of data for AI training; and laws requiring data portability. • Copyright and other intellectual property: Copyright and related laws, including the EU Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market and European Economic Area transpositions, which have introduced new licensing regimes, increase liability with respect to content uploaded by users or linked to from our platforms, or create property rights in news publications that could require payments to news agencies and publishers, which may result in other regulatory actions.
Our acquisitions and other strategic arrangements could also result in dilutive issuances of our equity securities, the incurrence of debt, contingent liabilities, or amortization expenses, or impairment of goodwill or purchased long-lived assets, and restructuring charges, any of which could harm our financial condition and operating results.
Also, the efforts we have taken and may take in the future to protect our proprietary rights, including obtaining copyright and patent protections for our important innovations, including AI innovations, may not be sufficient or effective.
At the same time, the White House's Executive Order, Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence, prioritizes deregulation, while its AI Action Plan emphasizes accelerating American innovation leadership. 17.
No longer disclosed
For example, the DOJ and a number of state Attorneys General filed a lawsuit alleging that Google violated antitrust laws relating to Search and Search advertising, and in August 2024, the U.S.
In the U.S., there is increasing uncertainty as to the federal government's approach to AI regulation going forward, as the continued applicability of the White House's 2023 Executive Order on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence, which lays out a framework for the U.S. government, among other things, to monitor private sector development of certain foundation models, remains subject to regulatory development.
Further, at the federal and state level, there have been various proposals (and in some cases laws enacted) addressing “deepfakes” and other AI-generated synthetic media. • Data privacy, collection, processing, and portability: Laws and regulations further restricting the collection, processing, and/or sharing of user or advertising-related data, including privacy and data protection laws; laws affecting the processing of children's data (as discussed further below), data breach notification laws; laws limiting data transfers (including data localization laws); and laws requiring data portability (including the EU Data Act, as discussed further below). • Copyright and other intellectual property: Copyright and related laws, including the EU Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market and European Economic Area transpositions, which have introduced new licensing regimes, increase liability with respect to content uploaded by users or linked to from our platforms, or create property rights in news publications that could require payments to news agencies and publishers, which may result in other regulatory actions. • Content moderation: Various laws covering content moderation and removal, and related disclosure obligations, such as the EU's Digital Services Act, Florida’s Senate Bill 7072 and Texas’ House Bill 20, and laws and proposed legislation in Singapore, Australia, and the United Kingdom that impose penalties for failure to remove certain types of content or require disclosure of information about the operation of our services and algorithms, which may make it harder for services like Google Search and YouTube to detect and deal with low-quality, deceptive, or harmful content, or on the other hand, may impinge on the rights of free expression, which, in turn, could impact how our platforms are viewed by users.
Furthermore, in December 2020, several State Attorneys General, led by the Texas Attorney General, filed an antitrust lawsuit in the U.S.
Table of Contents Alphabet Inc. as building AI capabilities into new and existing products and services, reflect our ongoing efforts to innovate and provide products and services that are helpful to users, advertisers, publishers, customers, and content providers.
Several states are considering enacting or have already enacted regulations concerning the use of AI technologies, including those focused on consumer protection, and depending on the scope of AI regulation at the federal level, some states may move to regulate AI model development and deployment.
To make progress toward this effort, we aim to reduce 50% of our combined Scope 1, Scope 2 (market-based), and Scope 3 absolute emissions (compared to our 2019 base year) by 2030, and we plan to invest in nature-based and technology-based carbon removal solutions to neutralize our remaining emissions.
Changes to our advertising policies and data privacy practices, such as our initiatives related to third-party cookies, including our announcement in July 2024 to move from phasing out all third-party cookies to a proposed user choice model (which remains subject to continuing discussions with regulators), as well as changes to other companies’ advertising and/or data privacy practices have in the past, and may in the future, affect the advertising services that we are able to provide.
Our approach will continue to evolve and will require us to navigate significant uncertainty, including the uncertainty around the future environmental impact of AI, which is complex and difficult to predict.
Table of Contents Alphabet Inc. • litigation or other claims in connection with the acquired company, including claims from terminated employees, customers, former stockholders, or other third parties.
As of December 31, 2024, Larry Page and Sergey Brin beneficially owned approximately 87.4% of our outstanding Class B stock, which represented approximately 52.1% of the voting power of our outstanding common stock.
For additional information about risks and uncertainties applicable to our work on sustainability and efficiency, see Item 1A Risk Factors of this Annual Report on Form 10-K.