Google has announced a fresh set of Android updates that enlist artificial intelligence to defend against human fraud, expanding AI’s role in detecting and blocking scam attemptsaddition of an optional “Enhanced protection mode” to Google’s Messages app, which Google will roll out to devices in “the coming weeks.”
Enabling that mode augments the on-device scam detection first shipped in March 2025, adding cloud analysis run in Google’s Private AI Compute environment. Google’s announcement says that the service keeps your data “encrypted and processed in a secure dedicated space,” where it’s “inaccessible to anyone else, including Google.”
This feature is available on phones as old as Google’s 2021-vintage Pixel 6, as well as 2024’s Samsung Galaxy S24 series and other devices that support the Android AICore system service.
On newer phones with more powerful processors—for example, last year’s Pixel 10 series and this year’s Galaxy S26 series—opting in to enhanced protection also tasks the on-device Gemini Nano model with evaluating links shared in messages to see if they match fraud patterns, even if those addresses aren’t yet in catalogs of hostile sites.
Activating enhanced protection also subjects links sent from numbers not in your contacts to a UI speed bump that, per Google’s description, provides “extra time and clearer context” before you tap those links.
Google is also expanding support for the scam-notification feature it added for third-party chat apps in September to a much wider array of phone vendors, including Motorola and OnePlus, as well as such non-US brands as Honor, Oppo, and Xiaomi.
An additional line of defense for Android’s screen-share feature requires 2024’s Android 15: expanding the automatic hiding of sensitive information, such as passwords and payment details, to screen sharing runer
Finally, sometime in December, users of “Pixel and other select devices” will get protection against call-forwarding scams. Android will block attempts by apps to intercept multi-factor authentication codes by using surreptitious forwarding and warn you when anybody tries to get you to type in a forwarding code in the phone’s dial pad.
Google’s post closes out with some jabs at Apple. One is a report from the research firm Leviathan Security Group—ordered up and paid for by Google—that evaluates default scam protections in Android and iOS and finds Android’s consistently superior. The other is a survey YouGov conducted for Google of some 4,500 smartphone users about their experiences with scams, which suggests iPhone users are more likely to get conned.
Most survey respondents reported never getting suckered by a scam and felt that their phone’s scam defenses were at least “moderately effective.” But iPhone respondents were 87% more likely than Pixel users to say they’d fallen victim to a messaging scam, 83% more likely to have been fooled by a calling scam, and two times more likely to call their phone “not effective at all” in protecting them against those threats.
