Google Published a Startup's Agent. The Authors Lasted 10 Minutes.

TL;DR

Artemis is an Android automation agent published under Google's GitHub organization on August 13. Its first commit shipped a pyproject.toml with version 3.6.3 and three authors from the startup Minitap, which are the version number and author list of Minitap's open-source agent mobile-use. About ten minutes later, a force push replaced that commit with one where only the author list had changed. The other 228 files stayed byte-identical. Minitap opened a GitHub issue with its evidence on September 11, and within ten hours Artemis added a Minitap credit to its README and headers to 23 files. A commit reverted shortly before that fix had also credited a second upstream project, FinalRun's agent. That credit is not in the repo today. Artemis has 4,340 GitHub stars. mobile-use has 2,910.

What Minitap found

mobile-use lets an LLM agent drive real Android and iOS apps. Minitap created the repo in August 2025. On January 15, 2026 it switched the project from MIT to the Apache License 2.0 and added a NOTICE file in the same commit. Version 3.6.3 landed on PyPI on March 19 with Pierre-Louis Favreau, Jean-Pierre Lo, and Nicolas Dehandschoewercker listed as authors.

Artemis arrived five months later, advertising a "99%+ success rate" on Google Research's AndroidWorld benchmark. On September 11, Dehandschoewercker, Minitap's CEO, published "I expected better from Google", and Minitap opened issue #40 on the repo. The post puts Artemis files next to mobile-use files: the ADB tunnel, the Hopper agent's instructions, a media helper, and a WhatsApp example with "the same task of sending Happy New Year messages to Alice, Bob, and Charlie."

Running a diff on the exact file versions the post cites gives zero changed lines in every case. Alice, Bob, and Charlie made the move from mobile-use to Artemis intact. The people who wrote the file did not.

The copied Python files open with a "Copyright 2026 Google LLC" Apache header. The mobile-use originals have no per-file header, so putting Google's name on top required no visible deletion. Artemis's LICENSE file ends with "Copyright 2026 Google LLC." Minitap's ends with "Copyright 2025 Minitap, Inc".

Ten minutes of authorship

Someone created the Artemis repo at 17:59 UTC on August 13. The first commit, authored at 18:36, included a pyproject.toml with version = "3.6.3" and mobile-use's three authors. GitHub's push activity log records a force push to main at 18:46:56. It swapped that commit for a new one with the same message and the same Gerrit Change-Id.

Comparing the two commit trees file by file gives 229 files in each and exactly one difference. The author list in pyproject.toml now names a single account, somew1nd, which has since made 107 of the repo's commits. Nobody changed the version number. It still says 3.6.3.

A force push rewrites a branch, but the old commit does not vanish. Picture a notebook that logs every page you tear out. The page is gone from the book, the log keeps its number, and GitHub will still hand you the page if you ask for it by hash. That is why anyone can open the original author list a month later.

The fix before the fix

Minitap opened issue #40 at 17:21 UTC on September 11. At 23:19, somew1nd pushed a commit touching 83 files, with 1,988 lines added and 3,652 removed. It deleted hopper.md and hopper.py, the agent whose prompt matched mobile-use byte for byte, and added an entity_extractor agent. It also added a NOTICE file crediting two Apache-licensed upstream projects: mobile-use and finalrun-agent, from FinalRun.

About three hours later, a second maintainer reverted it: "Please do not submit unrelated docs and codes in the same commit." The fix that stuck landed at 02:59 UTC on September 12. It touched 23 files, added 69 lines, deleted none, and carried the message "fix: complete README and relevant file headers per Apache 2.0 requirements." Derived Python files now carry "Portions of this file are derived from mobile-use" below the Google header. The README's last line reads "This project includes source code developed by Minitap, Inc."

The repo today mentions Minitap in 23 files and FinalRun in none, and it has no NOTICE file. FinalRun made the leaderboard chart in Artemis's README, at number two. It did not make the attribution.

No maintainer has replied on issue #40, which is still open. One commenter posted a list of more files they say closely resemble mobile-use code and lack the new header. AI Bacon has not verified that list. No public statement from Google turned up beyond the commit itself.

What the license and Google's own guide ask for

Apache 2.0 lets anyone copy, modify, and sell the code, Google included. In return, Section 4 asks for bookkeeping. Clause (c) requires a derivative work to "retain, in the Source form of any Derivative Works that You distribute, all copyright, patent, trademark, and attribution notices from the Source form of the Work." Clause (d) says that if the original ships a NOTICE file, derivative works must include "a readable copy of the attribution notices contained within such NOTICE file," either in their own NOTICE file, in the source or documentation, or in a display the software generates.

Google's guide to preparing an open-source release goes further. It says "any code that Google does not own the copyright to or that Google has not received under Google's Contributor License Agreement must be placed in a third_party directory at the root of the project," and "for files in the third_party dir, leave the existing headers in place." Artemis has no third_party directory. The derived files still sit in the main package under a Google copyright header, now with a Minitap line underneath. Whether a README sentence satisfies clause (d) is a question for lawyers. The commit that added it describes itself as completing attribution "per Apache 2.0 requirements."

The leaderboard wrinkle

The AndroidWorld leaderboard is a community spreadsheet whose header warns "Scores are self-reported and may be inaccurate." It lists Artemis second at 99.1%, behind a closed-source entry at 100%. mobile-use sits at 91.4% after a December 2025 update from 84.5%, tied with DroidRun. Minitap's own benchmark page claims 100%.

The chart in Artemis's README ranks Artemis first at 99.1%. It shows DroidRun at 91.4% and leaves out mobile-use at the same score. A community pull request, #64, adds Minitap to the chart. It is still open.

Artemis's sheet entry lists newer Gemini models than mobile-use's entry, and the repo has more than a hundred commits on top of the import. Nobody outside the team can say how much of the 7.7-point gap comes from the models, the extra engineering, or the code it started from. Attribution exists for exactly this case. When a score rests partly on someone else's harness, readers deserve to know whose.

If you publish Apache-licensed code

• Put a header in every source file. mobile-use's files had none, so a copy could gain a Google header without deleting anything. A stripped header shows up in a diff.
• Keep a NOTICE file. Clause (d) makes its attribution travel with derivative works, which gives you a specific clause to cite instead of an appeal to good manners.
• Treat metadata as a fingerprint. A version number and an author list gave this one away, along with example data about Alice, Bob, and Charlie. Minitap also says older Artemis versions shared a mobile-use bug. Distinctive prompts and fixtures are easy to search for on GitHub.
• Archive the evidence early. GitHub's activity log keeps the before and after SHAs of a force push, and orphaned commits stayed fetchable here. Save copies anyway.
• If you are the one importing, vendor the code under third_party/, keep the upstream headers, and carry the NOTICE. It takes minutes, and the first two steps are what Google's own release guide requires.

Key Takeaways

• Artemis's first commit listed mobile-use's version (3.6.3) and its three authors. A force push about ten minutes later changed only the author list, leaving 228 of 229 files identical.
• Diffs of the cited files show verbatim copies, including the entire Hopper agent prompt and 216 lines of ADB tunnel code, under "Copyright 2026 Google LLC" headers.
• Within ten hours of Minitap's GitHub issue, Artemis credited Minitap in 23 files. A reverted commit that had also credited FinalRun's finalrun-agent was never reapplied.
• Artemis still has no NOTICE file. It also has no third_party directory, which Google's own release guide requires for code Google does not own.
• Artemis's README chart shows DroidRun at 91.4% and omits mobile-use, which has the same score on the self-reported AndroidWorld sheet.
• If you publish Apache code, put headers in every file and ship a NOTICE. Metadata and example data are how copies get caught.

Sources: Minitap: I expected better from Google, google/artemis issue #40, google/artemis force-push activity log, Artemis pyproject.toml before the force push, Artemis commit 54fcef9 (NOTICE with two credits), Artemis revert 1d82d59, Artemis attribution commit 371aa6d, minitap-ai/mobile-use, mobile-use NOTICE, minitap-mobile-use 3.6.3 on PyPI, AndroidWorld community leaderboard, google/artemis PR #64, Google Open Source: Preparing for release, Apache License 2.0, Hacker News discussion