Google

On August 21, 2026, SpaceXAI made Grok 4.6 available on Google Enterprise Agent Platform via Model Garden at $2 / $0.50 cached / $6 per million tokens—the same list as Bedrock two days earlier—with a 500k context window and low through xhigh reasoning effort.

On August 20, 2026, Google DeepMind said the Gemma open-model family has surpassed one billion downloads, with developers publishing more than 100,000 Gemmaverse variants in two years. The same post launched the Awesome Gemma GitHub directory. Distinct from the Gemini app’s 1 billion monthly users on August 11.

On August 19, 2026, Marvell disclosed an 8-K: Google received a warrant to buy up to 58.97 million Marvell shares at $206.58—about $12.18 billion if fully exercised, roughly 7% and fifth-largest holder—vesting against custom-chip purchases through fiscal 2033. Commercial terms were signed July 29; Wednesday is the securities disclosure.

On August 19, 2026, Google opened Back to School 2026: eligible U.S. college students get 12 months of Google AI Pro ($19.99/mo value) with 4× Gemini limits, Spark, 5 TB storage, and Health Premium; students in 140+ other markets get Google AI Plus. Redeem by December 31, 2026, with SheerID verification. A student hub, study notebooks, 3D visualizations, and Deep Research inside Gemini Live roll out to all Gemini app users the same day.

On August 18, 2026, Guidelight AI Standards published its first public Control assessment of Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, xAI, and Meta. Information current through August 18; no lab scored above 3/5 on any of six practices. Anthropic and OpenAI tied at C+ (2.50); Google D+ (1.50); xAI D− (0.83); Meta F (0.67).

On August 14, 2026, Google VP Josh Woodward said Gemini and Flow now offer a Media watermark toggle that removes the visible sparkle from Nano Banana, Omni, and Lyria outputs—while invisible SynthID and C2PA credentials remain—the same day Anthropic explained Claude’s text watermark.

On August 13, 2026, Google released Gemini 3.7 Flash—23 days after 3.6 Flash—claiming large coding and agent gains and an introductory $0.75/$3.75 per million tokens through year-end. Independent Artificial Analysis scores 3.7 Flash (high) at 56 on the Intelligence Index, up 4 points from 3.6 Flash.

On August 12, 2026, Google’s Made by Google event launched Pixel 11, Pixel 11 Pro, and Pixel 11 Pro XL—on-device Gemini Nano running up to 3.5× faster on the new Tensor G6, Magic Capture, HiLight LED cues, and pre-orders from $899/$1,099/$1,299 ahead of an August 20 retail date.

On August 12, 2026, Ryanair and Google Cloud announced a five-year partnership putting Google Workspace and Gemini Enterprise in the hands of about 35,000 employees, with DeepMind models including AlphaEvolve and WeatherNext cited for fleet operations—and a dual-cloud resilience strategy as the airline targets 300 million passengers by 2034.

On August 11, 2026, Google said the Gemini app officially surpassed 1 billion monthly active users—the fastest-growing product in Google’s history and its 14th product over the billion-user mark—less than a month after reporting about 950 million MAUs.

On August 5, 2026, Google announced a DeepMind leadership overhaul: Demis Hassabis steps down as Google DeepMind CEO to become Chair of GDM and Alphabet’s Chief Scientist, Koray Kavukcuoglu becomes SVP running day-to-day GDM, and Jeff Dean leaves after 27 years with Sanjay Ghemawat and others to found public-benefit startup Discovery Loop.

On August 4, 2026, Trump administration officials told OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, and Nvidia that voluntary pre-release AI safety tests will target closed frontier models with state-of-the-art cyber capabilities—and will not put open-weight systems such as Meta’s Llama line and Nvidia’s Nemotron through the same review.

On August 3, 2026, a White House official said the Trump administration completed the voluntary frontier AI evaluation framework ordered in the June 2 executive order, and OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta were invited to a Tuesday White House meeting—days after both OpenAI and Anthropic disclosed cyber-eval breakouts into real systems.

On July 30, 2026, Google DeepMind launched the Gemini Robotics 2 family—whole-body robot control (Gemini Robotics 2), high-level embodied reasoning and multi-robot collaboration (Gemini Robotics ER 2), and an on-device adaptation tier—extending Gemini from tabletop manipulation to full humanoid locomotion and multi-robot teamwork.

On July 29, 2026, Google rolled out Lyria 3.5 inside Google Flow Music—its newest music generation model with claimed gains in musicality, lyrics, vocal expression, and direct tempo/duration control for full-song creation.

On July 28, 2026, more than 1,200 employees at frontier AI companies published “Pacing the Frontier,” urging the U.S. government to support international technical and governance tools to deliberately pace automated AI research—backed the same day by OpenAI and Anthropic as organizations.

On July 24, 2026, SpaceXAI launched a free Grok add-on for Google Workspace—one install for Sheets, Slides, and Docs from the Workspace Marketplace—so users can ask questions against open files, write formulas and charts, build decks, and draft documents in place, with optional connectors to email and Drive.

On July 21, 2026, Google launched Gemini 3.6 Flash ($1.50/$7.50 per 1M tokens) and 3.5 Flash-Lite ($0.30/$2.50) for agents at scale, while Gemini 3.5 Flash Cyber in CodeMender stays limited to governments and trusted partners; 3.5 Pro remains partner-testing only.

On July 16, 2026, Google DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs published a joint bioresilience program—prevention, detection, and response—citing 15+ government and biosecurity partnerships over 12 months, SynthID work for DNA synthesis screening, AlphaEvolve for metagenomic surveillance, and an Isomorphic unit for rapid medical countermeasures.

On July 16, 2026, Reuters reported—citing Bloomberg—that Alphabet’s Google is months behind schedule on Gemini 3.5 Pro, its flagship model, as the company works to improve capabilities especially in coding; CEO Sundar Pichai had pointed to a June release at Google I/O 2026.

On June 30, 2026, Google DeepMind opened Gemini Omni Flash (conversational video generation and editing) to developers in public preview via AI Studio and the Gemini API, and released Nano Banana 2 Lite (gemini-3.1-flash-lite-image)—its fastest, cheapest Gemini image model—for high-throughput generation at about $0.034 per 1K image and ~4-second latency.

On June 17, 2026, Noam Shazeer—Google vice president of engineering and co-lead of Gemini, Transformer co-author, and Character.AI co-founder—announced he is leaving Google to join OpenAI. The move comes less than two years after Google’s reported $2.7 billion Character.AI-linked rehire that returned him to lead Gemini work, and as OpenAI advances its confidential IPO process.

On May 20, 2026, Google published its first AI Mode usage data, reporting that the feature has surpassed 1 billion monthly active users globally, with queries running more than three times longer than traditional search and more than doubling every quarter since launch.

At Google I/O 2026 on May 19, Google announced the Gemini 3.5 series of models, advanced AI agents for Search and other products, information agents for subscribers, and updates to Android, Gemini app, and developer tools like Antigravity and Managed Agents, marking a shift to agentic AI experiences.