The EU has been pushing tech companies to open up their platforms for years. It started with charging ports and app stores. Now it has moved to something far more consequential: AI.
The European Commission has told Google that its Gemini assistant enjoys unfair advantages on Android. Gemini can be triggered by the power button, listen for wake words even when the screen is off, read whatever is on screen, and take actions inside other apps like Gmail or Google Maps. A competing AI tool, even if installed on the same phone, cannot do any of that. It sits in an app drawer, waiting to be manually opened.
The EU is calling that a structural advantage, not just a product feature. It wants Google to give tools like ChatGPT and Claude the exact same access. The formal decision is due in July. Non-compliance could trigger fines up to ten percent of Alphabet's total global revenue per year.
The timing matters. Google just announced that it is turning Android itself into what it calls an "intelligence system," with Gemini handling multi-step tasks across apps without the user needing to open anything manually. Ordering food, booking rides, pulling data from emails — Gemini is being wired into the core of the phone at the precise moment the EU is trying to stop that from becoming a locked-in advantage.
Apple's intervention in this case is not surprising. The company has been fighting the same EU law, known as the Digital Markets Act, for over two years. It was fined 500 million euros in April 2025 for not complying with rules around how developers can direct customers to cheaper payment options. It has delayed AI features in Europe — including translation tools and iPhone-to-Mac mirroring — arguing that the interoperability rules the EU demands create privacy risks. The EU's response has been that Apple is using privacy as a shield to protect its business model.
Apple's core concern here is precedent. If the EU successfully forces Google to open Android's AI layer to any qualified third party, it has a ready-made legal framework to apply the same requirement to iPhone. Apple Intelligence, Siri's deeper integrations, and whatever the company builds next would all be in scope. Apple knows this, which is why it described the EU's draft rules as creating "profound risks" — language that goes well beyond what you would expect from a bystander offering neutral technical feedback.
The privacy argument from both companies is not entirely wrong. Giving a third-party AI service the ability to read your screen, access your app data, and respond to your voice at all times does create real questions about where that data goes and who controls it. The concern is legitimate. But it is also conveniently aligned with the business interest of the two companies most threatened by this ruling.
What is actually at stake here is control over the AI entry point on two billion Android phones and over a billion iPhones. Whoever controls that entry point — the thing that activates when you press a button or say a word — controls what people use, what data gets collected, and which AI companies become dominant. The EU is betting that letting Google and Apple decide that unilaterally is how you guarantee that no European or independent AI company ever gets a real foothold on mobile devices.
The final word comes in July. Whatever the EU decides will set the rules for how AI assistants compete on smartphones globally, because no company can afford to build one version of its product for Europe and another for everywhere else.