Google and Apple are clashing with the EU over the future of AI assistants

Google and Apple have a big leg up in the AI race: their control of billions of smartphones around the world.

That’s according to the European Commission, which is now cracking down on what that means for AI assistants.

Apple and Google have long dominated the smartphone market, combining for roughly 5 billion active Android phones and iPhones worldwide, according to market research firm Omdia. And as AI continues to become more ubiquitous and specialized, the two tech giants are enabling their AI assistants to help complete tasks rather than just answer questions.

But the European Commission wants other virtual assistants to be just as prominent on smartphones as Google’s Gemini and Apple’s Siri. It’s now demanding that Google give other AI agents broader access to Android by July 2027. The EU’s mandate is part of the Digital Markets Act, a set of Big Tech regulations that went into effect in the region in 2023.

The European Commission believes this new mandate could help level the playing field in the AI race. About 427 million iPhones and Android phones fall under EU regulation, according to Omdia.

Apple and Google, however, say opening up their platforms could raise serious privacy concerns. Apple announced in June that it would not launch its new Siri AI assistant on iPhones and iPads in the EU because of the Digital Markets Act.

Experts agree that allowing external services to access Apple’s and Google’s operating systems could be dangerous for security and user privacy. But some also question whether privacy is Google’s primary motivation for pushing back on the EU’s rules.

“I would say that we have to take these tech companies’ arguments with a grain of salt and look at whether they’ve cared about privacy up to the point where suddenly a decision was affecting them in ways they don’t like,” Calli Schroeder, senior counsel and director of the AI & Human Rights program at the Electronic Privacy and Information Center, told CNN.

Opening up Android

The commission wants EU Android users to have a “wider and more feature-rich range of options to choose from, both when it comes to their AI services on Android and to search services,” according to a press release last week.

EU users should be able to access other AI agents with their voice and use third-party AI agents to operate apps on their behalf on Android as they would with Gemini, the commission says. It also wants Google to share search data with other search engines and AI chatbots so that other companies can offer a similar experience to Google Search.

Google must start sharing search data in January under the new mandate.

Google says the Android changes would pose a major security risk because it would give external apps “sensitive and powerful device permissions,” Kent Walker, Google and Alphabet’s president of global affairs, wrote in a statement on Thursday. He added that sharing search data would also “weaken citizen privacy, risk business trade secrets and endanger national security.”

Sameer Samat, Google’s Android president, said in an X post on Friday that the European Commission “is on the wrong track” with its rules and that users can choose to switch to another assistant on their own. Android phones have an option to change the default AI assistant in the settings menu.

Apple cited similar privacy concerns, saying the EU’s requirements would force Apple to “give any virtual assistant direct access to users’ private data.”

Apple said it proposed solutions that were rejected by the EU but it will continue to work with regulators. A European Commission spokesperson said it has been in regular contact with Apple on the matter.

Large tech companies that fall under the DMA, known as gatekeepers, “can implement appropriate privacy, security and integrity safeguards,” the spokesperson said.

The enforcement of regulations like the Digital Markets Act could also potentially impact Apple and Google’s influence over their smartphone software. ChatGPT is already installed on about 30% of EU smartphones, and the EU’s rules could give OpenAI a further edge, Bjorhovde wrote.

“The question is what the implications for Google or the consumer might be if the user can utilize ChatGPT to book an Uber, completely bypassing the need to engage with Android,” Runar Bjorhovde, an analyst with Omdia, told CNN over email.

Privacy concerns

The EU’s new mandate also highlights critical questions over privacy in the AI era — and the challenges tech companies and regulators face in solving them.

Without proper protections built into the software, giving apps deeper access to Android or iOS could allow them to sneakily siphon information from users’ phones, Schroeder said.

And what happens if the AI assistant malfunctions? The consequences could be critical if an agent has access to a user’s messages, location, and their device’s screen and microphones.

“It could exercise the user’s delegated authority to do other things that maybe the user might not have wanted it to happen,” said Michael Stokes, senior vice president of emerging technologies at Veilant, a company that sells secure infrastructure and communications products.

If AI agents are granted those types of permissions, phone makers like Samsung would be the ones to make those decisions and vet them, Google says.

Advancements in technology have historically required some type of privacy tradeoff, like giving apps access to your location for more accurate recommendations. But AI systems are often trained by scraping huge amounts of data from the internet, which could include a user’s personal information without their knowledge.

“We also want to make sure that users are aware of the risks they’re taking when they engage with AI systems,” Schroeder said. “And I think that awareness is where we really need to catch up a little bit more.”