Google DeepMind

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.

On May 12, 2026, Isomorphic Labs, the AI-first drug design company spun out of Google DeepMind, announced a $2.1 billion Series B funding round led by Thrive Capital with participation from Alphabet, GV, MGX, Temasek, CapitalG, and the UK Sovereign AI Fund to expand its IsoDDE platform and advance its therapeutic pipeline.

On May 11, 2026, Google's Threat Intelligence Group published a report documenting the first confirmed case of a cybercrime actor using AI to discover and weaponize a zero-day vulnerability—a 2FA bypass in a popular open-source web administration tool—planning a mass exploitation campaign that was preemptively disrupted.

On May 5, 2026, the Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI) at the US Department of Commerce announced agreements with Microsoft, Google DeepMind, and xAI to provide early access to new frontier AI models for national security and security risk evaluations before deployment, expanding prior partnerships and responding to concerns over advanced capabilities like those demonstrated by Anthropic's Mythos.

On April 22, 2026, at Google Cloud Next '26 in Las Vegas, Google Cloud announced a $750 million fund to deliver new resources and incentives to its 120,000-member partner ecosystem, helping accelerate joint customers' transformations with agentic AI. The fund supports global consulting firms, systems integrators, software partners, and channel partners in AI value identification, agentic AI prototyping, agent building and deployment, upskilling, and teams of embedded Google forward-deployed engineers.

On April 6, 2026, reports emerged that OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google have begun collaborating through the Frontier Model Forum to detect and counter adversarial distillation by Chinese labs, sharing information on attempts to extract capabilities from US frontier models in violation of terms of service.

On April 6, 2026, Anthropic announced an expanded partnership with Google and Broadcom for multiple gigawatts of next-generation TPU capacity expected online starting in 2027, as the company scales its frontier Claude models amid surging customer demand.

On April 2, 2026, Google DeepMind released the Gemma 4 family of open models — purpose-built for advanced reasoning and agentic workflows, available in multiple sizes from edge to server-class, now under a full Apache 2.0 license with no commercial restrictions.

On March 19, 2026, Google announced that Firebase is now integrated directly into Google AI Studio, enabling the Antigravity coding agent to set up Firestore, Authentication, security rules, and real-world service connections from natural language prompts for production-ready full-stack apps.

On March 18, 2026, the Gemini API changelog detailed the release of built-in tools and custom function calling combination support plus native Grounding with Google Maps for Gemini 3 models, allowing unified tool use in a single API call.

Google DeepMind is finalizing a new Gemini model, expected to bring significant advances in reasoning, multimodality, and agentic capabilities. Teasers from team members point to an imminent launch following recent infrastructure and research updates.

Google DeepMind and partners have released large-scale predictions for protein complexes, including homomeric and heteromeric structures across thousands of proteomes. The update includes high-confidence structures for millions of interactions, accelerating research in biology and drug discovery.

Google has finalized its acquisition of Wiz, the cloud security company, for $32 billion. The deal strengthens Google's position in securing AI workloads and cloud environments amid rising concerns over data access and compliance.

Google DeepMind released Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite in preview on March 3-4, 2026. The model is optimized for high-volume, low-latency, and cost-sensitive workloads with strong multimodal performance at pricing as low as $0.25 per million input tokens.

On February 19, 2026, Google released Gemini 3.1 Pro in preview across the Gemini API, Vertex AI, the Gemini app, and NotebookLM, positioning it as a smarter model for complex, multi-step work. Google and DeepMind materials highlight major reasoning gains—including reports of ~77.1% on ARC-AGI-2, more than double the prior Gemini 3 Pro score—and rollout to developers, enterprises, and consumers.

On January 11, 2026, Google announced the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP)—an open standard for agentic commerce—plus AI tools for retailers to connect with high-intent shoppers across platforms. The NRF-timed push positions Google Search and Gemini shopping experiences as an execution layer from discovery through purchase, competing with Microsoft’s same-week Copilot Checkout wave.