The European Commission wants rival AI assistants to plug into Android with the same access as Google's Gemini, and share anonymized search data with competitors. Google's security chief says the proposal would let fraud bloom within weeks.
The European Commission is preparing two simultaneous demands of Google: open Android so rival AI assistants can plug in with the same system access that Gemini, Google's built-in AI helper, currently enjoys, and hand anonymized search query, ranking, and click data to competitors at internal-grade granularity. The Commission's announcement is expected next month. Google's response, delivered by Heather Adkins, the company's vice president of security engineering, in a Wired interview reported by Ars Technica, is to call those demands a fraud accelerator. "If implemented as described today, I think within a short period of time on Android, we'd see a significant increase in fraud in the EU," Adkins told Wired, as reported by Ars Technica.
That quote is the news hook. It is also a Google assertion, not a documented outcome, and it lands inside a fight the EU has deliberately framed as competition policy rather than as a privacy or security proceeding.
The two levers are different. The first, de-integrating Gemini as Android's default AI assistant, would require Google to give rival assistants the same privileged system hooks Gemini now holds: access to user files, screen content, and enhanced voice interactions. Today those hooks are, in practice, Gemini's alone. If a competing assistant from OpenAI, Anthropic, or a Chinese vendor obtained the same level of access, the EU argues, the market for on-device AI on the world's most-used mobile operating system would become contestable for the first time.
The second lever is data. Under the Commission's reported draft, Google would share anonymized search query, ranking, and click-through data with rivals. The granularity is what matters. Search-ranking data at the internal level reveals which signals Google weighs most heavily and which it suppresses. For an ad-tech competitor or a vertical-search rival, that is the recipe book, not just the ingredients. "Anonymized" is the technical qualifier that the EU and Google will spend the next year arguing over.
Google has chosen to answer both demands on its preferred ground. Adkins's warning is not about monopoly or market structure. It is about the user, and that is a deliberate framing choice. Privacy and security are politically sympathetic in Brussels and in the member-state capitals where data protection authorities already sit across the table from Google. Antitrust is, in Google's telling, the bureaucratic pretext. Privacy and security are the actual harm. By collapsing the two demands into a single fraud warning, Google shifts the conversation away from what Gemini's privileged Android position represents in market terms and onto what could happen to a phone if that position is loosened.
The two arguments cannot both be true at once. Gemini's current lock on Android, with its system-level file access, screen awareness, and voice integration, is precisely the integration the Commission says creates the antitrust problem. If loosening it opens a fraud door, the answer is more controls on what any AI assistant can do on Android, not fewer. If loosening it does not open a fraud door, then Google is defending a privilege it cannot justify on safety grounds and must justify on market grounds instead. By demanding equivalent access for rivals, the Commission's draft forces that contradiction into the open from the start.
Adkins's "short period of time" claim deserves its own reading. She did not name a number of weeks; "short" and "weeks" both come from how the warning has been paraphrased in coverage. Whether the risk is two weeks or two quarters, the underlying mechanism is the same. More assistants with deeper Android hooks means more attack surface, which is a fair point in isolation. It is also a point Google could make about any expansion of third-party access on any platform, including ones it does not control, which is why the EU will likely counter with baseline security requirements that apply to every AI assistant on Android, not just to the ones that succeed Gemini.
Three things to watch when the Commission's formal announcement lands next month. The wording of "equivalent system access" will decide whether Google must hand rival assistants the same hooks Gemini has today or merely a narrower set. The anonymized-search-data provision will set the precedent for how much of Google's internal ranking machinery it must disclose, and on what cadence. And the first on-the-record reaction from a named EU member-state data protection authority will test whether Adkins's privacy framing has any traction outside Google.