For more than a decade, the fight between Brussels and Silicon Valley has been about browsers, app stores, and charging ports. This week it moved somewhere much more sensitive: the AI assistant sitting on the home screen of roughly 60% of the European Union's mobile phones. On July 16, the European Commission adopted two binding decisions under the Digital Markets Act ordering Google to give rival AI assistants deeper access to Android and to share anonymized Google Search data with competing search engines and AI chatbots.
The Android decision is the more dramatic of the two. Under the new rules, competing assistants will gain access to 11 specific Android feature groups — grouped by regulators into invocation, context, actions on apps and the OS, and access to device resources — on terms the Commission says must be equivalent to what Google's own Gemini assistant already enjoys. In practice, that means a user could eventually swap the "Hey Google" wake word for a rival assistant's own hotword, and let that assistant carry out tasks inside other apps, such as sending a message or booking a service, the same way Gemini can today.
Why Brussels moved on AI specifically
The Commission's own case documents, sent to Google as preliminary findings back in April, framed the stakes in stark terms: mobile AI assistants are becoming the new front door to the internet, and Google — with Android's dominant market share, its Gemini models, and its cloud infrastructure all under one roof — is "uniquely placed to leverage its strength" across every layer at once. Regulators concluded that leaving the AI assistant layer under a single company's control risked repeating the same competition problems that led to a separate €4.1 billion Android antitrust fine, which the EU's top court upheld just two weeks before this ruling.
Google's pushback — and Apple's very different response
Google has framed the ruling as a security risk rather than a competition fix, arguing that phone makers currently play a "key role in vetting" which assistants get access to sensitive Android capabilities, and that handing that access to outside apps without the same vetting "threatens device security." As of July 21, the company had not announced whether it would appeal.
Apple, facing a related but separate dispute over the same EU interoperability rules, chose a sharper response: rather than comply, it is withholding its new Siri AI experience from iPhones and iPads sold in the European Union entirely, alongside the iOS 27 and iPadOS 27 rollout. Apple argues that under the Commission's interpretation of the DMA, it would have to give competing assistants access to private information and app-control capabilities comparable to Siri's own — a bar the company says it isn't willing to clear for the EU market for now.
The timeline — and the stakes
Most of the Android measures are due by August 2027 as part of the Android 18 rollout, with a further requirement — letting multiple assistants listen for different wake words simultaneously — following a year later in Android 19. Noncompliance carries real teeth: fines of up to 10% of Alphabet's worldwide annual turnover, rising to 20% for repeat violations. Whatever Google decides, the ruling has already done something no fine could: it has turned Gemini from Android's built-in default into one contestant among several on a platform Google still owns — and set a template regulators elsewhere, including in the U.S., are likely to study closely.