The European Commission handed down two decisions on Thursday under the Digital Markets Act, ordering Google to open Android's system-level features to rival AI assistants and to share anonymised Search data with competitors. The changes to Search data sharing are due by January 2027, with the Android obligations following in July 2027.
The short version: assistants like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity are supposed to get the same hooks into your phone that Gemini already has. And competing search engines, plus AI chatbots, get access to the query, click, and ranking data Google has been sitting on for two decades.
What Gemini can do that the others can't
Right now the gap is real. As a pre-installed system app, Gemini can talk to other apps, control hardware, and run its "Hey Google" listening in the background all the time. Third-party assistants can approximate some of this, but not cleanly. The Commission's Article 6(7) proceeding, opened back in January, was specifically about closing that gap for AI services.
EU tech chief Henna Virkkunen framed the goal in ordinary-user terms: Android owners should be able to summon their preferred chatbot by voice the same way they say "Hey Google" now. Whether people actually switch away from the default is a separate question, and defaults are sticky.
The data moat
The Search side may matter more. Google holds somewhere between 89% and 91% of the global search market, and the anonymised query and click data underpinning that dominance is exactly what smaller search engines and AI models lack. The Commission's Article 6(11) obligation requires Google to hand it over on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms, and the eligibility of AI chatbot providers to tap that data was written into the proceeding from the start.
How much this helps is genuinely unclear. Anonymisation strips signal, and access reportedly comes at a price, so whether OpenAI or Mistral can build a real competitor out of it depends on details nobody has published yet. Calling it a fix for Google's data advantage is premature.
Google isn't happy
Google pushed back hard in a public response, arguing the decisions risk undermining privacy and security safeguards for millions of Europeans.
"AI assistants already safely access Android's capabilities, with phone makers playing a key role in vetting them." That vetting point is the one to watch, because it's also Google's lever: the company frames phone-maker approval as a security feature, which conveniently doubles as a gatekeeping mechanism over who gets deep access.
The company also warned that private searches could be exposed to unfamiliar companies without adequate anonymisation or user consent. Chief Legal Officer Kent Walker said the ruling disregards evidence of harm to users. A senior European official countered that Brussels took integrity, security and privacy into "utmost account," and the Commission insists the shared data will be anonymised.
Both sides are talking past each other on the word "anonymised," which tells you the fight moves next into implementation, not principle.
The part nobody's fined over yet
These two decisions aren't a formal probe and don't themselves carry penalties. But the DMA lets the Commission levy fines of up to 10% of a company's global turnover for violations, and a separate DMA investigation could reportedly produce a Google fine as soon as next week. Fines are not new territory for Google in Brussels.
Google has until January 2027 to start sharing Search data and until July 2027 to change Android. Expect the anonymisation standard and the vetting process to be where this actually gets decided.
