Minitap says Google's Artemis shipped its code with the credit stripped

Google's Pixel test team open-sourced an Android automation agent this week. The team it was built on top of says the authorship trail was rewritten before anyone saw it.

Minitap says Google's Artemis contains its code, and that the names of the people who wrote it were removed. Minitap published mobile-use in August 2025 under Apache 2.0 — an agent that drives real Android and iOS apps, 2,821 GitHub stars, and the reference implementation behind a clutch of mobile-agent papers. On September 11 the company's CEO, Nicolas Dehandschoewercker, wrote that opening Google's Artemis repo produced an immediate reaction: "What the fuck? We wrote this." Among the shared files, he lists the ADB tunnel implementation, planner helpers, app-lock utilities, agent prompts and SDK examples — several of which still carry mobile-use's own traces, including "Mobile use context" docstrings and a comment about replacing the lim CLI.

The evidence is a version history, not a vibe. In the commit Minitap points to as the pre-release state, Artemis's pyproject.toml carried mobile-use's version number, 3.6.3, and three original authors — Pierre-Louis Favreau, Jean-Pierre Lo and Dehandschoewercker — under a Google LLC copyright header. That state is dated August 13, minutes before the commit Google actually published. In the initial-release commit itself, the version is gone and the author list has been replaced with a single name. Minitap says the other 228 files in that commit are otherwise unchanged. Whether that was a deliberate scrub or an artifact of how a team's internal branch was folded into a clean public release, the outcome is the same: the upstream authorship never reached the public record.

Google's response has been partial, and it has already been rolled back once. After Minitap filed a public issue requesting a README acknowledgement, restored copyright notices and credit for the original authors and contributors, a contributor pushed a commit adding a NOTICE file naming Minitap, Inc. and a second project, finalrun-agent, plus derivative attribution headers on 17 files. Hours later, a maintainer reverted it — explaining only that unrelated docs and code should not land in the same commit and that the files could be resubmitted in better-organized ones. A follow-up commit then added a single sentence to the README and README_CN: "This project includes source code developed by Minitap, Inc." The NOTICE file itself is not in the repository at HEAD.

That is the gap Minitap is objecting to. Apache 2.0 permits anyone to reuse the code, including Google — but it requires redistributors to retain the relevant copyright and attribution notices. A single credit line naming the company, without the original authors or the per-file headers, is a thinner acknowledgement than the licence asks for and than Google published three hours earlier and then withdrew. Dehandschoewercker's post is careful about what he can prove: he says he has no evidence connecting the removal of the names to the company's unanswered emails or its omission from a benchmark comparison chart. What he does have is the old commit.

The benchmark dispute is where this stops being a licensing footnote. Artemis advertises a 99%+ success rate on AndroidWorld, Google Research's Android-agent benchmark, and ships that number as a badge and a comparison chart in its README. Minitap's own reported figure for mobile-use is 91.4%, shaded against Artemis's 99.1% on the same leaderboard — a sheet that explicitly states the results are self-reported and not independently verified. That caveat cuts both ways, and to be fair to Minitap it applies to its own 100% claim too. But a leaderboard that compares a fork against its upstream while leaving the upstream out of the chart is doing marketing work, not measurement work.

The practical read for anyone building on agent tooling: nothing here is likely to un-ship the code, and Apache 2.0 keeps it legally usable. The cost lands on the ecosystem's willingness to share. Maintainers who suspect their work will be republished under a bigger name with the history tidied up have one more reason to keep the next project closed — and Dehandschoewercker makes exactly that point, noting the version of mobile-use powering Minitap's product today is closed source.

Worth watching whether Google restores the per-file notices and the contributor names on a second pass, or lets the one-line README credit stand as its full response.

Is a one-line README credit enough when a company of Google's size ships your code — or should the original authors' names be non-negotiable? Tell us in the comments.

Sources: Minitap: I expected better from Google · google/artemis issue #40 — Missing attribution to mobile-use and its contributors · google/artemis commit adding third-party notices · google/artemis revert commit · minitap-ai/mobile-use (GitHub) · Hacker News discussion