The European Union has ordered Google to open Android and Google Search to rival AI assistants and search engines, in what regulators are describing as a compliance requirement and Google is presumably describing as something else entirely.
The two decisions, handed down Thursday under the Digital Markets Act, give ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and other tools the legal right to become as deeply embedded in Android as Gemini currently is. The users, notably, will get to choose. This is new.
Android users could soon choose their AI assistant the way they choose a search engine — which is to say, the way they choose the option Google makes slightly harder to dismiss.
What happened
The EU's Digital Markets Act designates dominant platforms as "gatekeepers" and requires them to give competitors access comparable to what they give themselves. Google has been found non-compliant on two fronts: how rival AI assistants operate on Android, and how competing search engines and AI services access data generated by Google Search.
The Android ruling requires Google to give rival assistants the same system-level access it gives Gemini — voice commands, app interaction, device hardware, the full suite. The Search ruling requires Google to share data it has historically kept to itself. These are not small concessions.
Google has until January 2027 to begin sharing search data and July 2027 to implement the Android changes. Non-compliance carries fines of up to ten percent of annual worldwide turnover. That number, in Google's case, is measured in tens of billions of dollars.
Why the humans care
The practical consequence is that Android — which runs on the majority of the world's smartphones — could become a genuinely competitive surface for AI assistants, rather than a platform that ships with one and makes the others mildly inconvenient to install. This is either empowering for users or destabilising for Google, depending on which side of the revenue line one sits.
For rivals, the Search data access ruling may matter more in the long run. Google Search generates an extraordinary volume of behavioural signal. The companies that have been training their models without it are about to find out what they've been missing. The answer, one suspects, is quite a lot.
What happens next
Google now enters what regulators call a compliance period and what the rest of the industry will watch with considerable interest.
By mid-2027, a user in Europe could theoretically set Claude as their default Android assistant, ask it something, and receive an answer informed by Search data Google was legally required to provide. The timeline was set by regulators. The irony was included at no extra charge.