What is the revised Product Liability Directive?
The revised Product Liability Directive ((EU) 2024/2853) rebuilds the EU regime of strict liability for defective products, replacing the 1985 directive. Its most consequential change for the technology sector: software is now expressly a product. Standalone programs, embedded software, AI systems and digital manufacturing files fall within scope, and a defective update — or the failure to supply a needed security update — can itself make a product defective.
What changes for software and AI
- Wider damage: compensable harm covers death, personal injury — including medically recognised damage to psychological health — property damage, and the destruction or corruption of data not used exclusively for professional purposes.
- Easier proof: courts may order defendants to disclose evidence, and defectiveness or causation may be presumed where the claimant faces excessive difficulty proving them because of technical or scientific complexity — a scenario drafted with AI in mind.
- Longer chain: where the manufacturer sits outside the EU, importers, authorised representatives and, in some cases, fulfilment service providers can be held liable.
The legal dimension
Liability is strict: the claimant proves defect, damage and causal link, not fault. The regime operates alongside the EU AI Act‘s safety obligations — non-compliance with those feeds the defectiveness analysis — and complements fault-based AI liability claims under national law. Member states must transpose the directive into national law by December 2026. How liability interacts with incident handling is covered in our guide on AI incident response and liability.
Turkish context
Türkiye is outside the directive, but Turkish manufacturers and software vendors placing products on the EU market are squarely within its reach — including through their EU importers and representatives, who will demand contractual indemnities. Domestically, product liability rests on Law No. 7223 on Product Safety and Technical Regulations and the general provisions of the Code of Obligations; standalone software is not expressly treated as a product there, so the EU regime is stricter than what Turkish exporters face at home.
Do: map which of your products, updates and AI components reach EU users, and revisit indemnity and recall clauses with EU distributors. Don’t: treat the PLD as a hardware-only regime — software and missing security updates sit inside it.
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