By now, most of us have heard the stories. AI companies scraping content from the web without permission, artists finding their work in training datasets they never agreed to, publishers filing lawsuits over scraped articles. It’s been a messy few years for AI and training data. So it’s actually a little refreshing that Google is taking a different approach with its latest effort, even if you’d never know it from the way they’re going about it.
According to a report from 404 Media, Google has been quietly emailing select Play Store developers with an offer to buy access to their app codebases to help train its AI coding tools. Developers keep full ownership of their code through a non-exclusive license. That means they can still do whatever they want with it, including selling access to other companies. The pitch frames it as a chance to “generate additional revenue from your apps.” Worth noting: the email never actually mentions AI. However, there is a link inside that takes developers to a page about partnerships to improve Google’s AI products.
What Google is actually asking for
Google is targeting developers with apps that have millions of downloads, so this isn’t a blanket offer going out to everyone on the Play Store. The goal, based on what Google told developers, is to get access to “high-quality, real-world codebases” to improve its developer tools. That’s a pretty clear signal that Gemini and its new Antigravity 2.0 coding agent need better training data to compete with the likes of Claude Code and GitHub Copilot.
This isn’t the first time Google has gone down this road. Back in 2024, Google struck a $60 million deal with Reddit to access posts for AI training, rather than just scraping the site like other companies had been doing. Same idea here, just aimed at developers instead of a social platform.
The weird part isn’t what Google is doing. Paying for training data, respecting IP, giving creators a cut. That’s how this should work. The weird part is how quiet they’re being about it.
