Google falls behind in AI coding wars, so it's quietly buying your code
google offered to pay play store developers for access to their private code to train ai models. this signals a shortage of high-quality training data and mounting pressure to catch up with rivals like anthropic and microsoft.
google has launched a pilot program offering to buy access to private code from android app developers to train its ai coding models. emails sent to developers frame the deal as a way to monetize inactive projects and help google improve tools, linking directly to a page about partnerships for ai products. this strategy indicates that publicly available web data is no longer sufficient to advance code generation capabilities, forcing google to pay for proprietary inputs. with anthropic and microsoft leading in ai coding, google is urgently seeking higher-quality data sets to close the performance gap.