Google wants to pay Play Store developers for code to train its AI

It appears that in a bid to improve its standing as the go-to platform for coders, Google has started contacting Android app creators to let them use their private codebases for model training, earning a little money on the side.

A developer, on the condition of anonymity, spoke to 404 Media's Jason Koebler about a confidential email from Google offering to buy codebase access to help improve development tools while letting creators retain the intellectual property rights to their code through a non-exclusive license:

This is a unique occasion to help transform tools and products, support the developer ecosystem, and unlock new revenue.

The Opportunity: We are looking for high-quality, real-world codebases to help improve Google's developer tools and products. Here is what this program offers you:

• Additional revenue opportunities: Get paid for sharing the code powering your apps, as well as your archived projects.

• Be an early adopter: As a pilot partner, you will shape how Google partners with the developer community moving forward.

• Drive impact: We've found real- world code to be useful to our product and service development across a wide variety of use cases, from understanding complex logic to developing coding evals and benchmarks. Your production tested code can directly help.

• Retain control: This is non-exclusive. You keep 100% of your IP, your app remains entirely yours, and you retain the right to monetize your data anywhere else.

The email ended with a link for the reader to learn more about Google's approach to partnerships, directing recipients to a page describing a "mission-driven opportunity" to help solve global problems.

There are many reasons why Google's Gemini has been lagging behind competitor tools. GitHub Copilot remains the gold standard for real-time "autocomplete," integrating seamlessly into IDEs and writing boilerplate code lightning-fast. On the other hand, Claude Code from Anthropic specializes in agentic coding, looking at your entire codebase to execute complex workflows. Claude Code is so effective that in late 2025, Microsoft let its own engineers use it, only to start revoking their licenses recently because it became immensely popular.

Google's obviously aware of the gap between these systems and is actively trying to fix it. At the recently completed I/O 2026 event, the company announced Gemini 3.5 Flash and Pro, as well as Antigravity 2.0, its answer to Claude Code, to help developers orchestrate teams of autonomous agents.

Paying developers to let them grant you access to proprietary projects so you can train algorithms is a relatively fresh tactic, showing that free codebases on the internet are not enough for the Mountain View giant. Microsoft toyed with a similar idea last year, albeit with publishers, not developers. The program, dubbed Publisher Content Marketplace, allows publishers to set licensing terms and receive payments whenever AI companies use their content.