n3t_admin Agreed, but we cannot rule out the U.S. Government trying to lock out chinese smartphone manufacturers from accessing the source code.
You are right, we know nothing [yet] so GrapheneOS may be a direct target... time will say. However, it makes more sense to me (on a civilized world) considering those chinese corporations as adversaries rather than a team that develops a superb Android-based operating system with privacy and security as goals.
It would be sad if it is the latter, considering that —even if it being less profitable than a device that helps gathering information from their users— GrapheneOS helps increasing the selling of relatively expensive smartphones, a market area where iPhones are the clear winners.
Hardened hardware is important for some users, but it is nothing without an operating system that makes these devices truly secure, so Pixels + StockOS does not make a lot of sense to me. They are secure, but security is nothing without privacy.
I don't own a smartphone, just a Pixel tablet (although I'm now considering buying my first smartphone, after half a century, once we know what GrapheneOS will do in the next years, as I think it's the only operating system that actually makes sense for a private person). However, I'm pretty sure that, without GrapheneOS, the natural choice would be a high-end Samsung device, since the best security-oriented hardware is useless if it just runs an OS that spies on you.
Google knows that Pixels + GrapheneOS are pure synergy, so I would not expect GrapheneOS being the target of this odd movement on their side.
Edit: to me, we cannot have security without privacy; a device that leaks users information can hardly be considered secure. Let us say it this way: privacy is a subset of security, we can have the former without the latter (to some degree), but we cannot have the latter without the former.