Google has started notifying customers that Checks, its privacy compliance platform for app and AI developers, is being discontinued.
The service will be fully shut down at the end of September
2026.
If your team relies on Checks for privacy reports, code compliance scanning, or AI safety evaluations, you have roughly six weeks to plan a migration and secure your data.
Here is what the announcement says, what Checks actually did, and what the shutdown tells us about where Google thinks compliance tooling is going.
What the announcement says On August 19, 2026, Google sent a "Deprecation of the Checks product" email to every active Checks account.
The key facts from the message: The deprecation timeline officially began on August 17,
2026.
The final sunset of the service is scheduled for the end of September
2026.
During the wind-down period, new user registrations and app uploads are disabled.
Feature access may be limited as the shutdown proceeds.
Accounts and all associated data will be automatically deleted once the service shuts down, unless you request earlier deletion.
You can request immediate deletion of your account and data by emailing [email protected] and including your Checks account number.
At the time of writing, the public Checks website and documentation are still online, but they have not been updated with a deprecation banner.
Customers are learning about this from the email itself, which is a reminder to keep an eye on service announcements from any vendor that holds your compliance data.
What Checks was Checks had an unusual path for a Google product.
It was first incubated in Area 120, Google's in-house incubator, before officially joining Google in May
2023.
It then launched in General Availability at Google I/O in May 2024, a milestone the team celebrated in its own blog at the time.
The product's stated mission was to simplify privacy compliance and reduce risk for digital product creators.
By the end, it covered three main areas: App Compliance: automated privacy checks for Android and iOS apps, including SDK data-flow analysis that flagged when user data was collected or shared in ways that could create regulatory exposure.
Code Compliance: scanning source code, including continuous integration pipelines, to catch privacy issues before release.
The product's marketing showed it flagging personally identifiable identifiers flowing into analytics SDKs directly inside Java code.
AI Safety: testing and evaluation tooling for generative AI features, aimed at teams that needed evidence that their models behaved within policy boundaries.
That last product line matters.
Checks was one of the more accessible ways for a mid-sized team to get structured AI safety evaluations without building an internal red-teaming practice.
Its disappearance removes a convenient option, not just a nice-to-have.
Why Google is killing it The email gives an unusually candid reason.
Google says that "as we enter the agentic era," the way developers approach compliance is shifting.
With the rise of its agentic platforms, the email specifically names the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform; developers can now build bespoke compliance tools and customized AI agents that fit their specific organizational needs.
Read that carefully.
Google is not claiming Checks failed in the market or that privacy compliance stopped mattering.
The argument is that compliance tooling is becoming something developers assemble themselves on top of general-purpose agent platforms, rather than something they buy as a finished product.
That is a significant position, and it deserves scrutiny from two angles.
First, there is a real trend underneath the press-release language.
Compliance work is heavy on repetitive evidence gathering: scanning data flows, mapping data sources to regulations, reviewing SDK behaviors, generating documentation.
These are exactly the tasks current AI agents handle reasonably well, and a custom agent can be tuned to an organi