EU forces Google to open Android to rival AI assistants
The European Commission adopted binding requirements under the Digital Markets Act ordering Google to open Android to competing AI assistants and share portions of its search data with rivals. Eligible third-party assistants will gain voice activation and cross-app capabilities across 11 Android feature groups, a move that could reshape how assistants like ChatGPT and Claude integrate with Android phones. The ruling is one of the most concrete regulatory actions yet aimed at preventing a platform owner from favoring its own AI product by default.
Google begins pretraining Gemini 4 while Gemini 3.5 Pro stays unshipped
Days after launching Gemini 3.6 Flash, 3.5 Flash-Lite, and a security-tuned Gemini 3.5 Flash Cyber variant on July 21, Google confirmed it has started what it calls its most ambitious pretraining run yet, for Gemini 4. The announcement lands awkwardly alongside the continued absence of Gemini 3.5 Pro, the flagship model that has now missed its target release multiple times, leaving a gap that rivals such as Moonshot's Kimi K3 and DeepSeek V4 are moving to close.
AMD's Advancing AI conference spotlights the infrastructure buildout
AMD's two-day "Advancing AI 2026" conference in San Francisco (July 22-23) drew attention to the infrastructure side of the AI race, with sessions on cloud and AI operations and continued momentum behind AMD's Helios platform, which Microsoft recently adopted to diversify its AI computing supply chain away from a single vendor.
Also this week
Federal lobbying disclosures show Anthropic spent $1.97 million on Washington lobbying in Q2 2026, up 26% quarter-over-quarter and now outspending Nvidia, while OpenAI spent $1.2 million, up 18%. Combined AI-lab lobbying spend hit $3.17 million for the quarter, up 23% from Q1. Meta continues to face user backlash after its AI moderation systems wrongly deleted long-standing Instagram and Facebook accounts, though the company says newer AI tools cut error rates by 13% versus human review.
The takeaway
Regulation and infrastructure are the two threads tying this week together: the EU's Android ruling shows governments are willing to force interoperability onto AI assistants before any single player locks in distribution, while Google's early Gemini 4 pretraining and AMD's infrastructure push confirm labs are still racing to out-scale each other even as their current flagship releases slip. Expect the next round of frontier launches to be shaped as much by regulatory access rules as by raw model capability.
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