It cost Google nearly $1.9 billion in privacy settlements over the past 12 months alone. Now Alphabet, Google’s parent company, is asking investors to trust its internal AI governance — without showing them what it actually does.
That choice goes to a vote on June 5, when NLPC’s Proposal Number 14 hits Alphabet’s annual proxy ballot. The Proposal asks the Company to publish an annual report on the risks of unethical or improper external data use in its artificial intelligence offerings. NLPC has published its executive summary of the case urging shareholders to vote FOR the proposal, and the full exempt solicitation report has been circulated to Alphabet investors ahead of the meeting. Shareholders of record do not have to wait — they can vote NOW through their proxy materials.
The bill is recent and concentrated. In May 2025, Alphabet agreed to pay Texas $1.375 billion — the largest single-state privacy settlement in the Company’s history — to resolve claims involving Incognito browsing, biometric, and location-tracking violations. Four months later, a federal jury ordered Alphabet to pay $425.7 million to nearly 98 million smartphone users whose data Google collected after they had switched off tracking settings. In January 2026, the Company agreed to a separate $68 million settlement over allegations that Google Assistant secretly recorded users’ conversations.
Run the math: $1.375 billion plus $425.7 million plus $68 million equals roughly $1.87 billion in privacy losses. Set that against the AI valuation Alphabet is chasing on the upside. The Company crossed $4 trillion in January and is now approaching $5 trillion, with Q1 2026 earnings showing AI capital expenditures continuing to climb. The same data troves driving that valuation are also driving the litigation, regulatory, and reputational risk shareholders need to assess.
The risks now extend from AI inputs to AI outputs. In October 2025, conservative activist Robby Starbuck sued Google in Delaware after Gemini and Bard fabricated false claims tying him to child sexual assault, fraud, and other crimes — allegations the suit says reached nearly 2.8 million unique users. In March, a Florida father brought the first wrongful-death lawsuit involving Gemini, alleging that the chatbot drew his 36-year-old son into a delusional spiral, instructed him to attempt a “mass casualty attack” near Miami International Airport, and ultimately encouraged his suicide.
When AI trained on improperly vetted data fabricates damaging claims about real people — or steers vulnerable users toward harm — the company that built and deployed it is the natural defendant. Alphabet’s existing internal review processes did not catch these outputs.
Regulators are not waiting for the Company’s internal systems to perform better. Ireland’s Data Protection Commission has opened an inquiry into Alphabet’s AI model that could find a “high risk to the rights and freedoms of individuals.” The Electronic Privacy Information Center and the Irish Council for Civil Liberties submitted the first national-security complaint under the Protecting Americans’ Data from Foreign Adversaries Act, alleging that Alphabet’s Real-Time Bidding system transfers sensitive data about U.S. military personnel and federal judges to entities in China and other adversary jurisdictions. The U.K. Competition and Markets Authority has ordered Alphabet to develop genuine publisher opt-out tools because Google’s existing controls do not stop publisher content from being scraped into AI Overviews.
Alphabet’s Board response amounts to “trust us.” Its opposition statement (found following Proposal Number 14 on Page 96 of the company’s proxy statement) describes an “authoritative, comprehensive, and auditable system of record” for AI assets, a “Secure AI Framework,” opt-out tools for publishers, and partnerships with NIST, the G7, the OECD, and the International Standards Organization.
None of that produces a single shareholder-facing disclosure. None of those internal systems prevented the $1.9 billion in settlements, the AI lawsuits, or the regulatory and national-security investigations described above.
Shareholders deserve to know how Alphabet manages that risk before the next courtroom or regulator forces the disclosure for them. NLPC urges Alphabet investors to vote FOR Proposal Number 14 NOW.
(Post references PX14A6G Notice of exempt solicitation)
