Minitap, a startup that builds autonomous QA agents for mobile and web testing, has publicly accused Google of incorporating code from its open-source project into Google's newly released Artemis repository — and of removing the startup's engineers' names from the file history. The allegations, laid out in a blog post published Thursday by Minitap CEO Nicolas Dehandschoewercker, quickly drew attention on Hacker News, where the thread gathered more than 100 points under the blunt title "Google stole open source code without crediting the authors."

"We opened Google's Artemis repository and started looking through it," Dehandschoewercker wrote, describing the moment the team examined the project for automating mobile devices. "My reaction was pretty immediate: 'What the [expletive]? We wrote this.'" For more context on this story, see our ongoing AI news.

What Minitap Says It Found

Minitap's project, mobile-use, is an open-source research experiment the company built to test whether AI agents could reliably interact with smartphones. The company says the evidence of reuse in Artemis is specific rather than circumstantial.

According to the blog post, parts of Artemis's code for connecting to Android devices matched Minitap's implementation exactly. The instructions for an agent called Hopper — a name, Minitap notes, that one of its engineers chose simply because he likes Minecraft — were, the company says, identical word for word. Even an example task built to keep an agent inside WhatsApp, instructing it to send New Year's greetings to users named Alice, Bob, and Charlie, survived into Google's repository with the same comments and cleanup steps, according to the side-by-side comparisons Minitap published.

The most striking claim concerns a shared bug. Minitap says an older version of its code contained a flaw in which a helper function would write a results file and then fail when it tried to read its own output on the next run. The company says it reproduced the same failure in both implementations — and that Artemis has since fixed it.

The Author History Claim

The attribution question centers on the repository's package history. Minitap says an earlier version of an Artemis package file listed its three engineers — Pierre-Louis Favreau, Jean-Pierre Lo, and Nicolas Dehandschoewercker — as authors. A later version replaced that file, and the only change, the company says, was the author list: all three names removed, another substituted.

Minitap reports that GitHub's activity record shows the replacement happened through a force push in August, before the company began its investigation this month. The earlier version is now marked by GitHub as detached from the main branch, but remains inspectable. Screenshots of both author lists appear in the company's post.

"Seeing the same name attached to the same instructions in Google's repo felt very familiar," Dehandschoewercker wrote. "Then we looked at the history and found our names in an older version. They had been removed."

The License Question

The legal weight of the complaint turns on licensing. Minitap's mobile-use is distributed under Apache 2.0, one of the most permissive open-source licenses in widespread use. Apache 2.0 explicitly allows anyone — Google included — to copy, modify, and commercialize the code. What it requires in exchange is preservation of the copyright and attribution notices that accompany the source, along with a copy of the license, in redistributed versions.

Minitap's position is that it welcomes reuse on those terms. "We chose open source because we want other people to build on mobile-use," the post states, pointing to ordinary mechanisms — forks, documented imports, README credits — that keep origins clear. The company says the Artemis README it reviewed on September 11 did not credit mobile-use, while acknowledging that Artemis "contains its own engineering work too," which it says could have been credited in the same place.

If the allegations hold, the apparent issue would be attribution compliance rather than theft of protected code — a distinction open-source lawyers emphasize, but one with real consequences. Apache 2.0's redistribution conditions require those notices to be preserved; using licensed code without them means acting outside the terms of the license, a situation open-source enforcement groups routinely treat as copyright infringement even when the underlying license is permissive.

A Public Record, and a Request for Response

Minitap says it has published a public factual record containing the detailed comparisons, archived files, and a timeline, so that others can verify the matches independently. The company also says it has contacted Google directly, and its post closes on disappointment rather than legal threat: "I'm disappointed in Google. And I think this matters beyond our own repository, because open source depends on people being willing to keep sharing their work."

The company adds a second grievance: it says its attempts to get attention for its benchmark results were "hard to get heard," framing the episode as an example of the asymmetry small research teams face when their work intersects with a platform company's output.

Google has not publicly responded to the allegations. Artemis remains publicly available, and Minitap's comparisons were still reproducible against the repository as of September 11, according to the company.

Why It Resonates

The dispute arrives amid intensifying scrutiny of how large technology companies treat the open-source ecosystem that much of the AI industry is built upon — from debates over training data provenance to accusations of model distillation between competing labs. Because Apache 2.0 compliance is binary and independently checkable, this case may prove unusually easy to adjudicate in public: either the archived package files and diffs show what Minitap says they show, or they do not.

For the open-source community, the stakes are relational rather than financial. As Dehandschoewercker put it: "Finding familiar code in another project is something you expect when you publish your work for people to use. Finding it under Google's name, without an acknowledgment of where it came from, is harder to take."

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