BRUSSELS — The European Union issued two binding orders against Google on Thursday, requiring the company to open key parts of its Android operating system to rival artificial intelligence assistants and to share search data with competing search engines, marking one of the most significant enforcement actions yet under the bloc's Digital Markets Act.

The European Commission, the EU's executive arm, said Google must give third-party AI services the same level of access to Android that its own Gemini assistant currently enjoys. Under the ruling, Android users across the bloc will gain the ability to activate their preferred AI assistant using voice commands by July of next year, a change regulators say is intended to give outside developers a genuine opportunity to compete on smart mobile devices rather than being confined to more limited functionality within their own individual apps.

The Commission's order identifies 11 specific feature points spanning four broad categories where Google must grant equal access to rivals. Those categories include the ability for users to invoke a third-party AI assistant much as they would Gemini, access to contextual data drawn from other apps and device sensors that allows an assistant to anticipate a user's needs, the ability to complete tasks across multiple apps rather than remaining confined to a single app's sandbox, and access to on-device hardware and software resources, including scheduling priority and neural processing capabilities that currently give Gemini a performance advantage over competing assistants.

Currently, Gemini can carry out tasks such as sending........

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