Google must give competing AI assistants and search engines the same access to Android and Google Search that it reserves for its own products, under two binding decisions the European Commission adopted on July 16, 2026.
What the Android order requiresThe first decision covers how rival AI assistants operate on Android.
Google Search has held more than 90% of the European market for years, and the Commission argues that its resulting data trove is something no rival can build alone.
It extended eligibility to AI chatbots that perform search-like functions, so the advantage does not simply pass from Google Search to Gemini.
Henna Virkkunen, the Commission’s executive vice-president for tech sovereignty, said the measures aim to foster “emerging alternatives to Google Search and Google’s AI services, such as Gemini,” and wider choice for EU users.
Google must give competing AI assistants and search engines the same access to Android and Google Search that it reserves for its own products, under two binding decisions the European Commission adopted on July 16, 2026. The orders target the two platforms that anchor Google’s business in Europe, and they hand rivals a level of access to its systems and data that regulators say they have never had.
The decisions spell out how Google must comply with the Digital Markets Act, the EU’s 2022 law that requires dominant “gatekeeper” platforms to give competitors the same access to their features and data that they grant their own services. These are specification decisions — binding measures that define, feature by feature, what compliance has to look like, rather than a financial penalty. They convert obligations Google already carried into concrete engineering requirements, and they follow roughly two years of talks that failed to produce workable remedies.
What the Android order requires
The first decision covers how rival AI assistants operate on Android. The Commission said competing assistants get only restricted access to the operating system, while Google’s own Gemini can use it fully, a gap it argues leaves alternatives less capable on the roughly 60% of European mobile users who are on Android. The order requires Google to open 11 Android features that assistants depend on, from voice activation to the ability to act across apps.
In practice, users will be able to summon a third-party assistant by voice, much like the “Hey Google” command, and let it carry out tasks on their behalf — drafting an email, ordering food, or surfacing a flight number from an inbox during a call. That opens the door for assistants such as OpenAI‘s ChatGPT, Anthropic‘s Claude, or Perplexity to plug into the same system-level hooks Gemini uses, rather than running as ordinary apps. The user, not Google, decides which tools get that access.
Sharing Google’s search advantage
The second decision forces Google to share the anonymised query, click, ranking and view signals its search engine generates — the same data it uses to refine its own results — with competing providers. Google Search has held more than 90% of the European market for years, and the Commission argues that its resulting data trove is something no rival can build alone. It extended eligibility to AI chatbots that perform search-like functions, so the advantage does not simply pass from Google Search to Gemini.
The Commission said it had to step in because Google’s earlier data-sharing offer was ineffective: it stripped out between 90% and 100% of unique queries and shut out AI chatbots, drawing no meaningful uptake. The new measures set a multi-layered anonymisation method, built with privacy experts and modelled on draft joint guidance from the Commission and the European Data Protection Board on how the DMA and the bloc’s privacy rules interact, alongside a pricing formula and an audited access process. Recipients can use the data to improve search, but not to train general-purpose AI models, and Google can screen out companies that pose serious security or data-protection risks.
Henna Virkkunen, the Commission’s executive vice-president for tech sovereignty, said the measures aim to foster “emerging alternatives to Google Search and Google’s AI services, such as Gemini,” and wider choice for EU users.
Google’s objections and what comes next
Google, whose leadership has publicly backed AI regulation in the past, has pushed back hard. “Today’s decisions risk undermining vital privacy and security guardrails for millions of Europeans,” Kent Walker, its president of global affairs, wrote in a blog post, arguing that opening Android’s system permissions to outside apps bypasses safeguards phone makers normally enforce and that sharing search data would expose Europeans’ private queries to unfamiliar companies. The Commission counters that its safeguards are sufficient and that it can revisit the anonymisation rules if independent testing exposes gaps.
Because these are specification measures rather than a penalty, they carry no immediate fine. But they sharpen Google’s exposure: if the company falls short, the Commission can open a separate non-compliance case carrying penalties of up to 10% of annual worldwide revenue. The decisions remain open to appeal at the EU’s courts. The search-data measures phase in through 2026, with Google set to finalise pricing by January 2027, while the Android changes must ship in the next major release, Android 18, by August 2027.
For the wider market, the stakes sit in distribution. The default, deeply integrated assistant on a phone captures users at the point of habit, and the ruling could reshuffle who holds that position across Europe’s Android base. It also previews how Brussels will handle Apple (AAPL ), which has cited the same interoperability rules in holding back AI features in the EU. The decision adds to the antitrust pressure building around Big Tech’s AI ambitions — landing on a company whose own leadership once welcomed rules it now resists.
