This is such a lousy excuse on Google part. We see multi-billion public companies bringing bold innovative products to extremely regulated sectors, like pharmaceutical and medical devices. Google can't deploy a chatbot because of lawsuits? Oh, c'mon...
Hindsight is 20/20. Before ChatGPT, chatbots had a lousy track record. Pretty much any such project run by bigtech had been cancelled due to PR issues ("Tay" etc).