The company is lagging behind Anthropic, OpenAI, and even Microsoft when it comes to AI coding tools, but 404 Media reports it’s found a novel way to expand its training base of code: offering to pay Android developers for access to the innards of their apps. [Link: Google Is Quietly Buying Code From Play Store Developers to Train AI | https://www.404media.co/google-is-quietly-buying-code-from-play-store-developers-to-train-ai/ | 404 Media]

Google is trying to buy code from some Android developers as part of a "confidential" program.

As Gemini lags behind tools like Claude Code and Copilot, Google is trying a different strategy, paying developers for access to high-quality, real-world codebases to train its AI…