By Edith Hancock


The European Union told Alphabet's Google what it should do to open up its Android operating system to artificial-intelligence services that compete with its own, the latest move by the bloc to rein in the search giant's market power.

The European Commission, the bloc's executive arm, said Monday that Google should ensure competing AI services can "effectively interact" with applications on Android devices. Those services should be able to execute tasks such as sending an email using the user's preferred email app, order from delivery apps or share photos with the user's friends, the commission said.

Android already enables AI assistants to thrive, said Clare Kelly, Google's senior competition counsel.

"Device makers have full autonomy to integrate and customize the AI experiences their users want," Kelly said.

"This unwarranted intervention would strip away that autonomy, mandate access to sensitive hardware and device permissions, unnecessarily driving up costs while undermining critical privacy and security protections for European users."

The Commission said it invited interested parties to comment via public consultation, a process open until May 13.

The EU's competition watchdog opened proceedings in January to instruct Google on how to comply with the bloc's Digital Markets Act, which obliges the world's largest tech companies to make it easier for rivals to compete with their widely used services such as app stores and smartphone operating systems. Companies can receive fines of up to 10% of their annual worldwide turnover if the commission decides they are in breach of the rules.

It's the latest move the EU has made to scrutinise how Google treats AI within its services, which risks drawing the ire of the U.S. The EU also told the company to give rival comparison sites access to its search engine data earlier this month and opened a fresh investigation into how the company pulls information from online publishers to power its AI Overviews last year.

"AI services are becoming more and more relevant for EU citizens' daily interaction with their mobile devices," Teresa Ribera, the EU's top competition enforcer, said in a statement Monday. "And it is critical to protect innovation by AI companies of all sizes," she said.


Write to Edith Hancock at edith.hancock@wsj.com


(END) Dow Jones Newswires

04-27-26 1346ET