When Google published Artemis, an open-source system for driving Android phones with natural language, Minitap's CEO wrote that his team opened the repository and recognized their own work: not a similar architecture, but their agent name, their prompt, and, in an older package file, their engineers' names under a Google copyright line. Then a commit that took the names out.

What follows is based on those files, the public git objects that still hold them, and the unannounced repair that followed. It is not based on a Google interview. Minitap says it contacted Google. As of 15 September, no Google employee has replied on the public issue, and The Frontier has not received an on-record statement.

A startup, a benchmark, a Google repo

Minitap, a French company building AI for mobile QA, open-sourced mobile-use in August 2025 under the Apache License 2.0. The project teaches language-model agents to operate real phones. By late 2025 it sat near the top of Google DeepMind's AndroidWorld leaderboard; Forbes covered a seed round and that ranking in December 2025. As of 15 September 2026, GitHub listed 2,987 stars on the repository.

Google's Artemis appeared on GitHub on 13 August 2026, also under Apache-2.0. It markets the same problem—natural-language control of Android—and reports more than 99 percent on AndroidWorld. The same day this piece was filed, GitHub listed 5,670 stars.

On 11 September, Minitap CEO Nicolas Dehandschoewercker published I expected better from Google. Co-founder Luc Mahoux-Nakamura filed issue #40 on the Artemis repository at 17:21 UTC. They asked Google to acknowledge mobile-use, restore attribution, and credit the people who wrote the code.

Apache-2.0 allows exactly this kind of reuse. It also requires that copyright and attribution notices travel with the work. The dispute is not whether Google may build on open source. It is what the history of this particular repository shows about credit.

The package file

GitHub still serves an Artemis pyproject.toml from commit 14e02c4. At the top of the file:

# Copyright 2026 Google LLC

Below that, the project is named artemis, version 3.6.3. The authors are listed as Pierre-Louis Favreau, Jean-Pierre Lo, and Nicolas Dehandschoewercker. Those are the same three names, in the same order, on Minitap's pyproject.toml at tag v3.6.3. Issue #40 notes that 3.6.3 is mobile-use's version number. Minitap's current main branch has moved on to 4.0.0; the three names are still there.

A later object, commit 206a9ce, keeps the Google copyright header and the same version number. The authors block is a single line: somew1nd, with the email wfq559@outlook.com.

Issue #40 describes that replacement as limited to the author list: "The other 228 files are unchanged." That is a description of one delta inside Artemis. It is not evidence that Artemis is a file-for-file copy of mobile-use, and this investigation did not attempt a full tree comparison. The overlap that can be shown without that exercise is already enough to matter.

On Artemis's main branch now, the package authors field names Farley Wang, at a Google address. The version is 1.0. Favreau, Lo, and Dehandschoewercker are gone.

Minitap says the author swap arrived by force-push in August and that GitHub marks the earlier version detached. The detached objects are public. The force-push itself was not independently reconstructed for this article.

The agent called Hopper

In mobile-use, an agent lives at minitap/mobile_use/agents/hopper/hopper.md. In Artemis, the path is artemis/agents/hopper/hopper.md.

The instructions are the same. From the heading ## Hopper through the rules about package lookup and ambiguous matches, the Artemis text matches Minitap's. The copy on Artemis's main branch, and on mobile-use at v3.6.3 and on main, reads:

## Hopper

Extract relevant information from batch data. **Keep extracted data exactly as-is** - no reformatting.

## Output
- **found**: `true` if data was found, `false` otherwise
- **output**: Extracted information if found, `null` otherwise
- **reason**: Brief explanation of search logic

## Rules
1. **Search entire input** - may contain hundreds of entries
2. **For app package lookup**: Match app name (or variations) in package identifier
 - Common patterns: lowercase app name, company+app, brand name, codenames
3. **Prefer direct matches** over partial matches
4. **Return `null`** if not found or if multiple ambiguous matches exist - don't guess

The 12 September repair added blank lines above that heading in Artemis's copy; it did not change the instructions. A derivation comment citing mobile-use went into hopper.py and other Python paths in the same commit, not into this markdown file. Google has not contested the match on the public issue.

Dehandschoewercker's blog says Jean-Pierre Lo named the agent after a Minecraft character because the team needed a name and he liked the game. The naming story is Minitap's.

What changed after they complained

On 12 September at 02:59 UTC—about nine and a half hours after issue #40 went up—GitHub user somew1nd pushed commit 371aa6df. The message: "fix: complete README and relevant file headers per Apache 2.0 requirements."

Twenty-three files changed. The README now says the project includes source code developed by Minitap. Hopper's Python module and other touched paths gained short comments citing mobile-use and Minitap's 2025–2026 copyright.

The login on that repair is somew1nd—the same name that replaced the three engineers in the package metadata.

As of 15 September, issue #40 is still open. A community pull request, #76, seeking fuller attribution, is still open and unmerged. No Google employee has replied on the thread.

Commenters have listed additional files they believe still need the same headers. Those paths were not re-checked file by file for this piece.

The license, without the sermon

Both projects use Apache-2.0. Under that license, Google can fork, modify, rebrand, and ship. Redistribution requires retaining applicable copyright and attribution notices and identifying changes in modified files (section 4).

Striking names from an authors field is not, by itself, a courtroom conclusion. Publishing derived files without clear upstream notice is the sharper compliance question—and whether every path in the pre-repair tree met that standard is not settled here. What the objects do settle is narrower: for a time, Artemis carried three Minitap names under a Google copyright header, then carried those names out.

A footer added after a public complaint does not rewrite that sequence. It documents that someone noticed.

The leaderboard, set aside

Minitap also has a separate grievance about AndroidWorld's public sheet and Artemis's comparison chart. Minitap states it has no evidence connecting that dispute to the author replacement. It is not this story.

What is still missing

Mahoux-Nakamura's issue asks for three things. The README now points at Minitap. Some file headers now cite mobile-use. The original authors have not been restored to the package metadata, and Google has not said how their names got into an Artemis file under a Google copyright line in the first place—or who somew1nd and wfq559@outlook.com are in relation to the company.

Google can build on open source. The record in this repository shows something more specific: an agent prompt that matches Minitap's, a package file that once named Minitap's engineers at mobile-use's version number, a replacement that named an Outlook address, and a repair by that same account after the startup went public—without an on-record answer from Google.

The code was always allowed to travel. The names were not supposed to vanish on the way.