The big picture: The modern AI arms race began in 2022 when OpenAI released ChatGPT, catching Silicon Valley's tech giants off guard. Since then, they have invested heavily in the technology, with Google firmly establishing itself as one of the sector's leaders. The company is now reportedly offering some Android app developers money to share the source code of their current Play Store apps and archived projects to help train its AI models.
According to a report from 404 Media, Google has emailed some Android app developers with a "confidential content offer pilot," inviting them to share their codebases with the company to help train its AI coding tools.
Google said the program would provide participating developers with an additional way to monetize their existing code while retaining their copyright. The company added that the licensing agreement would be non-exclusive, meaning developers would still be free to license their code to other AI companies if they chose to do so.
The emails also include a link to an official Google AI webpage urging writers, photographers, coders, and other creators to help shape a "transformative" future by sharing their copyrighted content with the company to improve its AI products.
The page notes that Google primarily uses publicly available internet data to train its AI models, but also compensates copyright holders for access to "non-public content in a range of media formats."
Google is already paying some website owners for access to their data for AI training. In 2024, the company signed a $60 million-per-year data licensing deal with Reddit, in what is considered one of the largest known corporate AI data licensing agreements in history.
The deal gave Google access to the Reddit Data API to train its AI models and improve its search algorithm. In return, Reddit integrated Google's AI tools into its app and website to enhance its own search and recommendation systems.
While Google's multi-modal AI model Gemini is a leader in many generative AI categories, it trails Microsoft's GitHub Copilot and Anthropic's Claude Code in the area of AI-powered coding agents. The company is eager to close that gap and is reportedly willing to spend significant sums to improve performance with Antigravity 2.0. It remains to be seen, however, whether developers are willing to provide their source code to Google – or any other company – for AI training.