A team at Minitap says Google copied their open-source code, stripped their names from the author history, and released it under Google’s own project without a word of credit. The claim, detailed in a post that hit the front page of Hacker News with 189 points, centers on Artemis, Google’s project for automating mobile devices. According to the Minitap engineers, large chunks of Artemis match their mobile-use project line for line.
This is worth paying attention to because it cuts at the trust that makes open source work at all.
What Minitap says happened
Minitap built mobile-use as an open research experiment: could AI agents reliably tap, swipe, and navigate real phones? They worked on it through February, then moved to a closed-source version that now powers their QA product. Then Artemis showed up. Their reaction, in the author’s words: “What the fuck? We wrote this.”
The overlaps they point to are specific:
- Android device code that matches their implementation exactly.
- An agent named Hopper with word-for-word identical instructions. The team notes they picked “Hopper” almost at random because an engineer likes Minecraft, which makes the identical name in Google’s repo hard to wave off.
- A WhatsApp example using the same task (sending Happy New Year messages to Alice, Bob, and Charlie) with the same comments and cleanup steps.
- A shared bug in older versions, where a helper wrote a results file then failed reading its own output. Both codebases reproduced the same failure.
The part that stings most: an earlier Artemis package file listed three Minitap engineers as authors. A later version removed all three and substituted a different author. Per the post, GitHub’s activity record shows that swap happened through a force push in August, before Minitap started investigating in September.
Why the license matters
mobile-use ships under Apache 2.0. That license lets anyone build on the code, fork it, even turn it into a competing product. What it requires in return is simple: keep the copyright and attribution notices, and identify your changes.
There are normal ways to reuse code cleanly:
- Fork it, so the link back stays visible.
- Document the source in an imported copy.
- Keep attribution notices with the code.
- Explain in the README what came from where.
None of that is exotic. Some is basic engineering hygiene; some is legally required. Minitap’s argument is that Artemis could credit both its own real engineering work and the borrowed code in the same place, and simply didn’t.
The benchmark side story
There’s a second thread. Minitap says it spent months trying to get updated results onto AndroidWorld’s leaderboard. Its confirmed score sat at 91.4% from December 2025, but newer submissions of 94.8% and then 100% went unanswered across four emails. As of September 11, the sheet still showed mobile-use at 91.4% while Artemis appeared at 99.1%.
These are self-reported numbers, and the leaderboard says outright that it doesn’t independently verify them, a caveat that applies to Minitap’s 100% too. Artemis’s own comparison chart, they note, left mobile-use out entirely while including an unrelated project with a similar name. To their credit, the Minitap team says they have no evidence tying the unanswered emails or the chart to the removal of their names.
Why it matters
Open source runs on a quiet bargain: publish your work, and you’ll still get recognized when it travels. Break that quietly enough times and fewer people publish. When a company the size of Google is the one accused of scrubbing attribution, maintainers everywhere read it as a warning about what sharing costs them.
Minitap has posted archived files, side-by-side comparisons, and a timeline as a public record. Google has not publicly responded as of this writing. The full breakdown, including the code diffs, is available at the original source.