EU Issues AI Competition Compliance Guidelines to Google, Forcing Open Access to Android System
The European Commission formally issued a series of proposed measures to Google on Monday, detailing how the tech giant should provide access to core features of its Android mobile operating system to AI competitors in order to comply with the EU’s Digital Markets Act.
Regulators point out that Google currently reserves key capabilities within its Android system – such as voice activation, background operation, and deep interaction with system applications – for its own Gemini AI service. The latest proposal requires Google to provide third-party AI assistants with access “no less effective” than that given to its own Gemini service.
The measures proposed by the European Commission aim to ensure that competing AI services can effectively interact with applications on users’ Android devices and perform tasks, such as sending emails using a user’s preferred email application, ordering food, or sharing photos with friends.
“The measures proposed today will provide more choice for Android users regarding the AI services they can use and integrate on their phones, including a wide range of AI services competing with Google’s own AI,” said the EU’s anti-trust chief in a statement.
Meanwhile, the European Commission issued preliminary findings to Google in mid-April, requiring Google to open search data to third-party search engines (including AI chatbots with search functionality) on fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory terms. The proposed data sharing includes four categories: rankings, queries, clicks, and browsing.
Notably, the EU explicitly includes “AI chatbots with search functionality” within the scope of data beneficiaries. This means that once the measures are finally passed, AI search products such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude will be able to access decades of accumulated search user behavior data from Google.
Currently, both sets of measures are in the public consultation phase. The public consultation period for the proposal regarding AI assistant access to the Android system will end on May 13th; the consultation period for the measures regarding search data sharing will end on May 1st. If Google is ultimately found to be non-compliant, it could face fines of up to 10% of its global annual turnover.
Google has strongly opposed the EU’s intervention. A senior competition legal counsel for the company criticized the intervention, saying it would deprive device manufacturers of autonomy, force access to sensitive hardware and device permissions, and undermine privacy and security protections crucial to European users.
Analysts point out that this regulatory action marks the EU’s transition from turning the Digital Markets Act from principled guidance into quantifiable operational details, with the core goal of redefining AI capabilities from “downloadable applications” to “competitive operating system level.”
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