The co-founder of startup Minitap has accused Google of unfairly borrowing intellectual property. He says the tech giant copied the open source code of their mobile-use tool, removed the names of the original engineers from the commit history, and released the project under its own name, Artemis, without any mention of the original source.
The co-founder of startup Minitap has accused Google of unfairly borrowing intellectual property. He says the tech giant copied the open source code of their mobile-use tool, removed the names of the original engineers from the commit history, and released the project under its own name, Artemis, without any mention of the original source.
This was announced by the startup's co-founder, Luke Mau-Nakamura, on LinkedIn.
The story began with the development of a tool called mobile-use, created by the Minitap team to control mobile interfaces using natural language. The project won first place in Google DeepMind's AndroidWorld benchmark with a 100% success rate, after which the authors made it publicly available on GitHub , where it collected almost 3,000 stars.
According to the startup's co-founder, two days ago, Minitap developers drew attention to a new open tool from Google for mobile automation called Artemis.
As Luke Mau-Nakamura states, a detailed analysis of the repository revealed striking similarities:
out of 229 files in the Artemis project, 228 turned out to be exactly the same as the mobile-use code;
the agent's name "hopper", accidentally invented by engineer Jean-Pierre Law, and its system prompts were copied word for word;
in the history of the old source commit, the names of the co-founders and developers (Pierre-Louis Favreau, Jean-Pierre Lo, Nicolas Dehandschoewercker) were purposefully replaced with the name of another author.
The Minitap co-founder expressed deep disappointment with Google's actions, noting that he had always considered the company a model of high engineering culture. He emphasized that the team opened the code specifically so that other companies could build on their work, but the deliberate removal of the names of authors and third-party community contributors is unacceptable.
The mobile-use developers have publicly appealed to the administrators of the Artemis repository to acknowledge the use of their project, restore all copyright notices, and officially indicate the original engineering team.
