Apple Sides With Google In Fighting EU’s AI Measures

Apple is reportedly opposing Europe’s efforts to require Google to help its AI competition access its services.

As Reuters reported Wednesday (May 13), the European Commission (EC) has been seeking feedback on measures to help Google comply with the Digital Markets Act (DMA).

The EC said earlier this year it planned to take a closer look at whether Google’s artificial intelligence features were in keeping with the legislation.

“Artificial Intelligence tools are transforming the way we seek and receive online information on our smartphones and even how we interact with our devices,” Teresa Ribera, the EC’s executive vice president for clean, just and competitive transition, said at the time. “This creates new opportunities. We want to maximise the potential and the benefits of this profound technological shift by making sure the playing field is open and fair, not tilted in favour of the largest few.”

Google has said these proposed measures—which would allow rival AI services interact with Google apps to do things like send emails or order food—would go against important privacy and security protections for users in Europe.

Apple said in its submission to the EC that it has a vested interest in the case, given its own operating system for its device, underlining the larger implications for how platforms must deal with third-party AI access, the Reuters report added.

The proposed measures “raise urgent and serious concerns. If confirmed, they would create profound risks for user privacy, security, and safety as well as device integrity and performance,” Apple said in its submission, per Reuters.

“Those risks are especially acute in the context of rapidly evolving AI systems whose capabilities, behaviours, and threat vectors remain unpredictable as we are now seeing time and again,” the company added.

According to Reuters, Apple also wondered about the EC’s technical expertise and objective in what it described as “redesigning” an operating system.

“It is substituting judgments made by Google’s engineers for its own judgment based on less than three months of work,” Apple said. “It is all the more dangerous given the only value that can be discerned from the DMs guiding this work appears to be open and unfettered access.”