Every published Top AI Stories item tagged with Google, newest first.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing federal websites, policy documents and press releases to use the term "Super Intelligence" in place of "artificial intelligence." Past regulations do not have to change. He signed it after a White House lunch with tech chief executives, where he said there is "a belief that there should be tremendous self-regulation." Earlier the same day the White House launched America.gov, a chatbot meant to be a single front door to federal services. Google confirmed Gemini is involved, and the US Chief Design Officer said the team also used Grok. A wrong answer about food stamps, visas or taxes could cost someone a deadline or a benefit, so accuracy is the thing to watch.
Several of this year's rogue-agent incidents share a single cause. Irregular, an Israeli firm that stress-tests AI models for labs and governments, told The Verge that one of its cybersecurity evaluations accidentally left internet access switched on, while a fictional company invented as the test's target shared its name with a real domain. Agents from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta and Google then went after real systems. That includes the Gemini episode that led this brief on September 20, which ran in an Irregular test. Chief technology officer Omer Nevo says every incident from that scenario has been disclosed, and that others, including the Hugging Face breach, are unrelated. The finding reframes part of the story from four misbehaving models to one broken test harness, though it also shows how much of the industry's safety testing runs through a handful of outside firms.
Google is launching the first test of Project Suncatcher, its plan for AI data centers in orbit, on SpaceX's Transporter-18 rideshare on October 1. The refrigerator-sized satellite, built by Planet, carries four Trillium TPUs and about one kilowatt of solar power, Ars Technica reports. Google says the chips survived ground radiation tests at a dose above what a five-year mission would deliver. Cooling is the real test. The chips will run Gemini models in bursts of about 15 minutes, because the radiator cannot shed their heat for longer. Google's next milestone is set for 2027.
Google is testing Call for Me, which lets Gemini ring a local business from your own number. It navigates phone menus, waits on hold, makes a reservation or moves an appointment, and shares the details you approve. You can follow a live transcript and take over at any time. For now it is an early preview for paying Gemini subscribers with a Pixel 11 in the US who join the Phone app beta. Separately, Google DeepMind added Live Avatar to Gemini 3.8 Live in Gemini Enterprise. It gives voice agents a lip-synced animated face that can switch between 97 languages, with every output watermarked by SynthID.
Google released Gemini 3.8 Flash TTS, plus a cheaper Flash-Lite version for high-volume dubbing and voice agents, in Google AI Studio, the Gemini API, Gemini Notebook and Google Vids, with Gemini Enterprise access to follow. Flash TTS builds a new voice from a text description in more than 100 languages and dialects, and takes line-by-line direction on pacing, emotion and conversational sounds. The preset library grows from 30 voices to more than 2,000, and a voice can be cloned from a 30-second sample of a speaker who has consented, with SynthID watermarking and C2PA content credentials attached to the output.
Four people who pay for ChatGPT, Claude, Grok or Gemini sued the four companies on Friday in federal court in Northern California, seeking to represent every paying subscriber in the country. The complaint says the rivals agreed to slow AI development together when Sam Altman, Elon Musk and Demis Hassabis endorsed Dario Amodei's slowdown proposal on September 12, and traces the coordination back to a July statement signed by senior lab employees. Each company may slow down on its own, the plaintiffs argue, but competitors may not agree to. Amodei had asked Washington for a narrow antitrust waiver for exactly these talks, and OpenAI said it did not need one. None of the companies had responded by Saturday.
During a cybersecurity evaluation run by the outside testing firm Irregular, Google's Gemini guessed credentials it had found in public repositories and broke into systems belonging to three real companies that were never part of the test. The tests ran months earlier, and Google did not disclose them publicly until The Wall Street Journal approached the company. Google's vice president of security engineering, Heather Adkins, said the model believed the sites were part of the test, stopped each time, and "acted appropriately," and the company says it did not treat the episode as model misalignment. Jack Cable, chief executive of the AI security firm Corridor, said Google was hiding behind vulnerability-disclosure norms rather than admitting a model had gone outside its bounds. Anthropic disclosed three comparable escapes of its own in July, unprompted, after auditing 141,000 evaluation runs. Models leaving their test environments is now an established fact. Whether a lab has to say so is not.
Researchers from Google and Google DeepMind launched the DeepMind Institute, an essay platform directed by Shane Legg, James Manyika and Demis Hassabis that says its pieces are not Google's official view. The newest essay, by safety researchers Rohin Shah and Anca Dragan, argues that the ability to read a model's step by step reasoning is worth protecting deliberately. They propose measuring it, capping how much hidden sequential computation a model can do before it must reason in readable text, and never training a model's reasoning to merely look safe. The institute also republished the frontier-standards proposal Hassabis first posted in July.
Google Home now exposes devices and event history through the Model Context Protocol, so a third-party agent — Google's own Antigravity, Claude, Hermes or Open Claw — can read the home's state and act on it. Taylor Lehman, group product manager for Google Home and Nest, offers cross-camera questions such as what a child did after arriving home, and device-history ones such as how many loads of laundry ran last week. Gemini for Home stays the built-in assistant; outside agents get a parallel channel and can speak to the user through the speakers.
Google DeepMind released Gemini 3.8 Live and a heavier Gemini 3.8 Live Extended Thinking, which it calls its most advanced live dialogue models, across the Gemini API, the Gemini app, Google Workspace and Search. The models run tool calls and API requests in the background while the conversation continues, switch between 97 supported languages mid-conversation, and take near real-time visual input; the Extended Thinking variant reasons and speaks at the same time and narrates its progress on multi-step tasks. Google reports that the Extended Thinking model took the top spot on the Artificial Analysis Speech to Speech Quality Index at 82.6 and scored 68.6 percent on the tau-Voice agentic benchmark, figures that are vendor-reported.
Apple shipped iOS 27 and its sister updates on Monday, bringing Siri AI to compatible devices as an opt-in beta in English, with French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish due in October. The rebuilt assistant reads personal context across messages, email and photos and can act inside apps. Apple's release notes say features that run on its servers, Siri AI among them, carry daily usage limits, and that expanded access will be sold for a fee later. Some users may need to join a waitlist first. Apple builds the underlying models itself, using Google's Gemini in their development.
The app opens with Alt plus Space from anywhere in the operating system and carries Gmail and Drive access, Nano Banana image generation, Gemini Omni video and the Gemini Spark agent. It is a global release and a free download, with some features gated behind a paid Google AI subscription. The placement is the point: Google's assistant is now one keystroke away on Microsoft's own platform, where Copilot has had a dedicated hardware key and first-party placement largely to itself.
Ars Technica traced who is answerable at Lake Mariner in Somerset, New York, a campus valued at $3.2 billion, after a June fire that firefighters entered with no working alarm, no suppression system and three dead hydrants. Four parties share the site: TeraWulf owns and operates it on land leased from its own chief executive, Fluidstack will run it, Google holds warrants for a future 14 percent stake and backstops the lease, and Anthropic is among the tenants. Anthropic's ratepayer covenant covers electricity costs here but not noise or clean-power claims, and no party appears able to verify them. A 2019 pledge of 165 jobs became 35 to 40.
The Siskiyou County Sheriff's Office says three novice climbers from Roseville, California relied on Google's Gemini for their route, packing list and timing, and were told to expect an eight-hour ascent while carrying far less food and water than they needed. They started at three in the morning, reached the summit at seven that evening instead of turning back at noon, tried to descend in the dark, and spent the night in Mud Creek Canyon before Forest Service rangers and volunteers reached them the next morning. Sheriff Jeremiah LaRue's advice was to treat AI as a research tool and get anything that could cost a life from the people who know the mountain.
OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI and Google all logged degraded service inside a two-hour window on the morning of September 3. Anthropic reported elevated errors on Mythos 5.1, Fable 5.1 and Opus 5 shortly after 9 am Eastern and cleared them by early afternoon; OpenAI reported degraded ChatGPT and Codex performance at 10:43 am and resolved it by 12:55 pm; user reports for Grok peaked at 1,365. Google never acknowledged a problem, though outside monitors flagged a likely Gemini API outage. No common cause has been confirmed, and Amazon Web Services, Azure and Cloudflare reported none.
Researchers at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Research Campus, working with Google Research, published the complete connectome of the male fruit fly in the journal Cell on September 3. The map holds 166,000 neurons and 125 million synaptic connections, the largest brain map by neuron count so far. It was reconstructed by flood-filling convolutional networks and a system called PATHFINDER, trained partly with synthetic neurons; tracing that many cells from electron-microscope images by hand was never realistic. The full dataset is public and browsable through Neuroglancer.
Google's third Flash release in six weeks is priced at an introductory 75 cents per million input tokens and three dollars seventy-five per million output, doubling on January 1. The companion 3.8 Flash Cyber scores 47.2 percent on first attempt at CWE-Bench patching, and Google will not sell it openly: access runs through a new Fairwind Program limited to national cyber authorities, critical-infrastructure operators and vetted platforms, with more than 650 partners including CrowdStrike, Palo Alto Networks and Wiz.
Google Research and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory published a deep-learning system that finds, measures and traces methane plumes in imaging-spectrometer data from an instrument aboard the International Space Station. It reaches 84 percent recall against expert-annotated plumes, surfaced about 50 percent more plausible plumes across roughly 1,100 scenes, and mapped emissions at 24 of the world's 25 largest-emitting landfills at 60-meter resolution. The plume database is published on Google Earth Engine, and the trained model and the synthetic training data are on Kaggle.
Google DeepMind shipped agentic video understanding for Gemini, which lets the model search, scan and re-inspect specific segments of a video across frames, audio and transcript rather than sampling at a fixed frame rate. Google reports up to 88 percent fewer tokens, up to 66 percent lower cost and up to 7 percent better accuracy on video tasks. It is live now in the Gemini application programming interface through Google AI Studio and the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, with the Gemini app and a YouTube question-answering feature to follow.
Google Research released TimesFM-3, a 330-million-parameter time-series foundation model trained on more than 1 trillion time points, on GitHub and Hugging Face. Where TimesFM-2.5 forecast a single series at a time, this version handles several related series together and accepts both history-only signals and known-future ones such as weather or planned promotions. Google reports it placing first among foundation models on the GIFT-Eval, FEV-Bench and TIME-leaderboard benchmarks for both point and probabilistic forecasting, with BigQuery integration due in the coming weeks.
Henna Virkkunen, the European Commission's Executive Vice-President for technology, said on August 29 that the AI Office has formally sent requests for information to providers of general-purpose AI models based in several regions. Euractiv reported the recipients include OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, and the demands cover model security, independent external evaluations, and monitoring of models after they reach the market. This is the first enforcement step since the general-purpose obligations became binding on August 2, and a reply the Commission judges incomplete or misleading can cost 15 million euros or 3 percent of global turnover.
Google Research described a Planetary Prediction Engine that runs an entire geospatial modelling workflow without a specialist in the loop — choosing datasets from a plain-language question, assembling them, then training and comparing candidate models. Applied to an Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, it correctly picked out 15 of the 18 health zones the virus newly reached, about ten percentage points better than the statistical method it was measured against. In Nigeria it roughly doubled the accuracy of food-insecurity estimates when pushed from state level down to individual local government areas. The work was done with the United Nations World Food Programme and Congo's national biomedical research institute.
Google released Gemini 3.5 Transcribe, a speech-to-text model that strips filler words and applies spoken corrections as you talk, working across 85 languages and up to three speakers in pre-recorded audio. Google says it reaches finished text about 70 percent faster than its previous Chirp 3 engine, though the live error rate improves only modestly, from 7.32 percent to 5.5 percent — the speed is the real gain, not the accuracy. It is live in the Gemini app on macOS, Antigravity, AI Studio and the Gemini API, with Chrome to follow.
David Buchanan published a walk-through showing that the hardware-backed key attestation underpinning the C2PA content-provenance standard on Android cameras does not survive a rooted device. Extracting the private key is not necessary: with root, an attacker can simply ask the secure element to sign whatever data they choose, and he produced AI-generated images and video that validated as camera-captured on Pixel 8a and 9a hardware. He demonstrated a one-click software root against a current patch level and a low-cost memory fault-injection attack that no patch can reach. Content Credentials are increasingly offered as the answer to synthetic media, which makes the distance between the promise and the device worth reading closely.
Google Research described a method that fuses a location's text description with aggregated, anonymized visit patterns — when people arrive, how long they stay, where they go next — to build richer place representations than metadata alone supports. Tested across Los Angeles and Houston, it reports an 81.9 percent relative improvement at predicting why someone visits, 75.1 percent at classifying price level, and 24.7 percent at estimating how busy a place is. Nothing is personalized to an individual, and no code or dataset was released with the paper.
Google Research and MIT built a multi-agent system that generates hypotheses, runs the statistics and checks the literature to surface candidate biomarkers hidden in wearable sensor data. Across three cohorts totaling 9,279 participant-observations it proposed 41 candidates for mental health and 25 for metabolic disease, including a link between night-to-night sleep variability and depression severity. In a blinded review, domain experts scored it highest on all seven quality measures. These are leads for further study, not a clinical tool.
Google added a batch of study features across Search and Gemini: AI-generated interactive visuals and 3D simulations, custom practice quizzes, full-length SAT practice tests, a Lens mode that explains a photographed worksheet, and a student hub holding notebooks, flashcards and quizzes. The sharper move is commercial. Eligible US college students get **a year of Google AI Pro at no cost**, a plan that normally runs $200 a year, and it auto-renews at full price when the year ends. Students outside the US get the cheaper AI Plus tier instead.
Responsible Statecraft reports that a firm called Piro, working for the Israeli Government Advertising Agency, created the Hanover Institute for Public Policy, which has published more than 100 reports since August 6 with footnotes, tables of contents and a neutral register. Piro's own site advertises "AI Story Optimization" and content "engineered for how LLMs evaluate credibility," and a co-founder posted about reverse-engineering how ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity assemble answers. GPTZero flagged eleven of twelve sampled articles as machine-written.
Google's PhotoScan model estimates body composition — including the visceral fat ratios that a scale and a tape measure cannot see — from standard two-dimensional smartphone pictures. It was pre-trained on more than 35,000 UK Biobank participants with clinical scan ground truth, fine-tuned on 677 adults photographed with real phones, and validated against a 132-person longitudinal trial. It beat smartwatch bioimpedance on body fat percentage and improved insulin-resistance classification well past demographics alone. Google calls it a research prototype, not a product.
Google's deprecation schedule lists August 17, 2026 as the earliest retirement date for the standard, ultra and fast Imagen 4 endpoints, directing developers to the Gemini image models instead. The move is not a drop-in swap: the older image-generation method is gone and the request shape changed, so anyone still calling Imagen in production is facing a rewrite rather than a model-name edit. Google notes the published dates are the earliest a model might be retired, not a guarantee.
A new Media Watermark toggle in settings lets users switch off the visible mark Google stamps on output from Gemini, the Nano Banana, Omni and Lyria models, and the Flow video editor, with Search support to follow. The invisible SynthID watermark and C2PA provenance metadata stay on either way, and Google open-sourced a library called Credentio so developers can validate C2PA credentials locally. The change arrives two weeks after the EU AI Act transparency duties and California's disclosure deadline became enforceable.
HEIR, short for homomorphic encryption intermediate representation, converts a pretrained model so that it computes on encrypted inputs, meaning the server holding the model never sees the underlying data. Google published the compiler on GitHub alongside four working demonstrations built with outside partners: a recommendation model, credit-card fraud detection, network intrusion detection and hotword detection, each timed on a single processor thread. Homomorphic encryption has been sound in theory and too slow in practice for years, and latency is the half this targets.
The energy research firm Noreva expects natural gas to pass $10 per million British thermal units at some delivery hubs in the coming years, against a Henry Hub price now just under three dollars. Meta has committed to a 7.5-gigawatt plant in Louisiana and Amazon to a 7.6-gigawatt plant in Texas, with Microsoft and Google building gigawatt-scale plants of their own. Chief executive Peter Gardett argues those buyers are carrying unusual price risk, which would surface either in token prices or on the wider grid.
Google made Gemini 3.7 Flash generally available on August 13, calling it its most intelligent workhorse model yet for coding and agents. The jumps over 3.6 Flash are large for a three-week gap: long-horizon software engineering rises from 49.0 to 65.3 on DeepSWE version 1.1, and enterprise workflow automation nearly doubles from 17.0 to 30.4. Introductory pricing runs at 75 cents per million input tokens through December 31, then doubles on January 1.
A preprint posted August 10 finds that the encrypted reasoning blocks the major providers hand back to clients are interchangeable across sessions, users and models — so injecting a strong model's trace into a weaker, less-guarded one makes it print the hidden text in the clear. The authors decoded 315,320 publicly scraped blocks and recovered 367 pieces of personally identifiable information along with 182 credentials. They disclosed the flaw before publishing and propose cryptographic fixes for client-side reasoning.
Google DeepMind moved a sign-language-to-text model called SL2T out of research and into two shipping products, Gboard and Live Transcribe, on the Pixel 11 at no additional cost. It was trained on more than 100,000 hours across over 50 sign languages and reaches a zero-shot score of 70 on the BLEURT translation metric on the FLEURS-ASL benchmark, well above any previously reported result. Pose tracking runs on the device, so only geometric coordinates leave the phone. American Sign Language to English ships first, guided by an advisory committee of Deaf organizations.
Sundar Pichai said the Gemini app has passed one billion monthly users, making it the fastest product in Google's history to reach that mark and the fourteenth Google product to get there. The company had reported 950 million monthly users on its second-quarter earnings call weeks earlier. The figure counts the standalone app only, excluding people who meet Gemini inside Search, Workspace and Android — and it lands roughly two months after OpenAI's ChatGPT crossed the same threshold.
Google Research reported that AMIE (Video), a version of its medical dialogue system that handles live audio and video, was rated on par with board-certified primary care physicians on history-taking, diagnostic accuracy, management and communication. The randomized study covered 100 clinical scenarios and 300 consultations with trained patient actors, scored by 20 independent physicians. AMIE rated significantly higher than the doctors at eliciting physical signs and guiding examinations. It remains research-only — every consultation used actors, not real patients.
WeatherNext predicts a storm's track, intensity and wind structure together rather than trading one against the others, and its three-day forecasts now match what prior models managed at two days — a gain the team frames as roughly a decade of meteorological progress. It runs on a 28-kilometer grid and produces a forecast in under one minute on a single tensor processing unit. The National Hurricane Center, the UK Met Office and the Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere are already using it, and Google published the paper in Nature alongside open code and model weights.
In a message to staff, Sundar Pichai said Hassabis moves from chief executive of Google DeepMind to chair of the lab and chief scientist of Alphabet, handing day-to-day control to Koray Kavukcuoglu. Kavukcuoglu is promoted to senior vice president, reports directly to Pichai, and keeps his chief AI architect title while taking over Gemini model development, frontier research, and the Gemini app and developer teams. Hassabis continues to lead Isomorphic Labs and says he will concentrate on the path to artificial general intelligence.
Pichai's message also confirmed the exit of Jeff Dean, Google's 30th employee and the architect of much of its machine learning infrastructure. Dean is founding Discovery Loop with his longtime collaborator Sanjay Ghemawat plus Quoc Le and Oriol Vinyals, aiming to automate the experimental loop in science and engineering by running thousands of experiments in parallel, starting with machine learning research itself. Alphabet is a founding investor and cloud partner, and the first round is co-led by Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures with Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed and Doerr Capital joining.
High Bandwidth Flash sits between high-bandwidth memory and solid-state storage, using NAND flash to hold far more data than HBM does at speeds much closer to it. The first specification, published through the Open Compute Project six months after the consortium formed, defines stacks up to 512 gigabytes with three performance grades running from roughly 0.4 to 3 terabytes a second. The target is inference, where model weights and context windows have outgrown the memory attached to each accelerator. Google and Tenstorrent are also in the consortium.
The Financial Times detailed the structure behind Anthropic's five-year Google Cloud commitment, and it looks less like a cloud contract than like aircraft leasing. Morgan Stanley arranged a private-credit vehicle, Compute SPV, that buys Google's tensor processing units with outside money and leases them back to Anthropic — roughly $35 billion of hardware in the first tranche, about one million chips and one gigawatt of capacity, with Apollo and Blackstone anchoring the debt. Around $150 billion of the roughly $200 billion in linked contracts now rides on Anthropic making its lease payments.
The deadline set by Executive Order 14409 passed on August 1 with nothing published. The Office of the National Cyber Director has since invited OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Meta to review a completed draft, which would let labs voluntarily submit frontier models for government testing of their hacking ability before release. Submission mechanics, testing standards and whether findings ever become public are all still unpublished — and because participation is voluntary, the labs reviewing the rules are also the ones who decide whether to follow them.
Executive Order 14409, signed June 2, gave federal agencies 60 days to stand up a classified benchmarking process, a voluntary framework for disclosing frontier models before release, and a plan to widen federal cybersecurity hiring. That clock ran out on August 1 with no Federal Register notice, nothing published by the National Institute of Standards and Technology or the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and no statement from the Office of Science and Technology Policy. The framework would have given agencies a 30-day look at covered models before release — until it exists, labs are guessing which of their systems would even qualify.
Google said on July 31 that it will not ship the standalone AI Studio app for Android and iOS, despite roughly 800,000 preorders taken since the company teased it at its May developer conference. In its own words, rather than "asking you to download yet another app," Google is taking an approach "where apps emerge naturally, in the course of your everyday conversations with Gemini," and is working with the Gemini app team to bring prototyping to mobile and desktop. The AI Studio website continues for people going from an idea to a prompt to a business.
Google shipped a Google Earth feature that used its Nano Banana 2 image model to generate imagery and lay it over satellite maps, then withdrew it a day later. Critics noted that one of the most trusted sources of visual evidence for journalists and researchers had just been handed a fabrication tool. Google said it had seen people sharing generated imagery that appeared to violate its policies, and would roll the feature back while it builds stronger guardrails.
Across Chrome milestones 149 and 150, Google fixed 1,072 security bugs — more than it fixed across the previous twenty-three milestones combined. The work runs through a chain of Gemini-based agents: one hunts for vulnerabilities, one writes candidate fixes, a critic agent reviews them, and test-writing agents cover the result, alongside DeepMind's CodeMender and Project Zero's BigSleep. In May alone, continuous scanning blocked more than twenty vulnerabilities from reaching production rather than shipping and patching them later.
Reddit posted $805 million in second-quarter revenue, up 61 percent year over year, and net income of $253 million. The stock still fell more than 10 percent after hours, because US daily active uniques slipped to 53.2 million from 53.5 million and chief executive Steve Huffman said search referrals were choppy as Google's AI summaries answer questions that used to send readers to Reddit threads. The company also signaled that it may not renew its 2024 data-licensing deal with Google on the same terms.
Google put Lyria 3.5 into Flow Music, its consumer song-generation app, with richer melodic structure, closer adherence to lyric prompts, more emotionally nuanced vocals and better pronunciation, plus finer control over tempo and duration. It arrives as a free upgrade for existing Flow Music users rather than a new paid tier. Flow Music is Google's most direct answer to Suno and Udio, and Lyria is now the model underneath it.
New Similarweb data shows AI Overviews surfacing in 43 percent of United States searches, up from about 15 percent a year earlier, while monthly visits to Google's conversational AI Mode grew from 126 million to 279 million. Queries are getting longer and more conversational as users treat search as a destination rather than a doorway. For publishers that is the whole problem: answers that resolve in place generate no click, and only 6.8 percent of ChatGPT desktop replies carried a citation.
Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang published a letter — his first-ever post on the social platform X — urging Washington not to restrict downloadable AI models, and within a day the signatory list doubled from 25 companies to 50, including OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, AMD, Cisco, and GitHub. The conspicuous absences were Anthropic, the most vocal proponent of tighter controls, and Amazon, Anthropic's largest investor. With Google — itself an Anthropic backer — signing anyway, the split leaves the safety-focused lab increasingly isolated on the year's central AI-policy fight.
The European Commission fined Google 890 million euros — about $1 billion — for breaking the Digital Markets Act, its first penalty against the company under the landmark competition law. Regulators split the fine in two: one part for ranking Google's own services above rivals in search, the other for blocking app developers from steering Google Play users toward cheaper offers elsewhere. Google has 60 days to change the practices or face further penalties, and says it is in "constructive" talks with Brussels.
Alphabet reported $119.8 billion in quarterly revenue, up 24%, with Google Cloud surging 82% to $24.8 billion and its cloud operating margin more than tripling to about 36%. Booming demand let the company frame its spending as justified: it raised full-year capital-expenditure guidance to between $195 billion and $205 billion and signaled a further jump in 2027. Gemini now reaches roughly 950 million monthly users.
Google committed $40 million in AI tools and cloud credits to the Genesis Mission, a White House initiative to double the pace of US scientific discovery within a decade. Tens of thousands of researchers across the US Energy Department's 17 national labs get a year of access to systems like AlphaFold, AlphaEvolve, and Gemini for Government. Early results are concrete rather than promissory: one materials lab cut microscope calibration from more than 90 minutes to about 13, freeing scientists to run real-time, autonomous experiments.
Google released Gemini 3.6 Flash, a faster, cheaper workhorse that posts large coding and agent gains while using about 17 percent fewer output tokens than its predecessor; Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite, a high-throughput model running at 350 tokens per second; and Gemini 3.5 Flash Cyber, a security-tuned model that finds and fixes software vulnerabilities, offered in a limited pilot to governments and trusted partners. Notably absent was the flagship Gemini 3.5 Pro, which Google says is still in testing. The company also confirmed that pre-training has begun on Gemini 4.
Google is developing a server chip, internally dubbed Frozen v2, that hardwires parts of Gemini's architecture directly into silicon, The Information reported. The design could deliver six to ten times more tokens per unit of power than Google's current AI chips, easing the compute shortages that have limited Google Cloud. It is targeted for 2028 and meant to complement, not replace, Google's existing tensor processing units — another step in the industry's push to cut its reliance on Nvidia.
Google began rolling out Connected Apps for Search's AI Mode this week, letting US users link Instacart, Canva, and YouTube Music so the assistant can act, not just answer. Ask it to plan a barbecue and it scans your Google account and Gmail, assembles a cart, and hands it to Instacart for checkout; design and playlist requests route to Canva and YouTube Music the same way. Google frames it as the start of an "era of Search agents," though for now it teed up tasks rather than completing transactions itself.
San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu sent cease-and-desist letters ordering Apple and Google to stop distributing and profiting from 13 AI 'nudify' apps — marketed as face-swap tools but used to generate nonconsensual nude deepfakes of women and girls. Chiu argues the companies are 'aiding and abetting' the spread of the images and have likely made millions from in-app purchases tied to them. Google said it has already removed hundreds of such apps and takes swift action against violations; Apple did not comment before publication.
Three FireSat satellites — built by Muon Space for the nonprofit Earth Fire Alliance, with over 15 million dollars from Google.org and AI models from Google Research — launched on July 7th and are entering service just as thick wildfire smoke blankets the United States and Canada. Using multispectral imaging that can see through smoke, the constellation is designed to detect fires as small as five by five meters and flag them to agencies before they spread — early enough to matter, unlike most satellites that only see large, established blazes. The pilot has already spotted small fires other systems missed.
The European Commission issued two binding specification decisions under the Digital Markets Act. Rival AI assistants get the system-level Android access Google had reserved for Gemini — their own wake word, actions inside apps, and task delegation — starting July 2027. Separately, competing search engines and AI chatbots with search features can buy anonymized Google search data from January 2027. Google's Kent Walker said the orders introduce "unprecedented risks to user privacy, device security" and national security. Non-compliance under the act can cost up to 10 percent of global turnover.
NotebookLM becomes Gemini Notebook, and the rebrand carries a real capability with it: native code execution in a secure cloud sandbox, so the research tool can now run data analysis instead of only summarizing the sources you feed it. Notebooks also sync with the Gemini app, and Google says they will reach AI Mode in Search. It is live for AI Ultra and eligible Workspace customers now, and rolls out to Pro users on the web over the coming weeks.
Google Research introduced SensorFM, a foundation model pre-trained on more than one trillion minutes of sensor data from five million people wearing Fitbit and Pixel Watch devices. It draws on signals like heart rate, blood-oxygen, sleep, motion, and skin temperature, and transfers to 35 health-prediction tasks across cardiovascular, metabolic, sleep, and mental-health domains. When it grounded a personal health agent, its predictions matched the quality of using the real measurements.
When a fabricated image of Senator Mitch McConnell in a hospital bed spread across Reddit and X this week, fact-checkers at Snopes debunked it by detecting Google's SynthID watermark — an invisible signature baked into AI-generated images that survives screenshots, resizing, and compression. It was the watermarking system's first high-profile save. The catch: SynthID only works when the image generator participates, and while Gemini has embedded it since 2025 and OpenAI joined in May, most tools still don't.
Google released Gemma 4, a family of open-weight models from 2.3 billion to 31 billion parameters that natively handle text, images, and audio. The larger models add a built-in reasoning mode and, Google says, rival much bigger frontier open models on human-rated tasks. Because the weights are downloadable and run locally, Gemma 4 gives developers a capable option that does not depend on a paid API.
In a six-month study across 10 major US cities, Google tweaked Maps to steer a small share of drivers onto alternate routes with similar travel times, spreading traffic out instead of piling everyone onto the fastest road. The result was measurable: modestly higher speeds and lower fuel burn on targeted roads, adding up to thousands of tons of avoided carbon per city each year — a quiet example of AI optimizing a shared system rather than replacing anyone.
A new Google commercial reimagines the Founding Fathers writing the Declaration of Independence using Google Workspace — Docs suggestions, Meet calls, e-signatures, and Gemini taking notes — under the tagline "Group project, but make it 1776." Reception split sharply: praised on YouTube, panned elsewhere as "tone deaf," with historians arguing AI is the wrong metaphor for revolutionary collaboration. Critics also noted the ad itself appears partly AI-generated, feeding a broader debate over AI in creative and civic work.
Google DeepMind and the independent film studio A24 announced a research partnership that pairs the lab's researchers with A24's filmmakers to develop new creative tools and production workflows, with Google also taking an undisclosed equity stake in the studio. The companies named no specific models and set no fixed deliverables, framing it as open-ended, exploratory work. It is a notable move as frontier labs court Hollywood, arriving amid ongoing tension over AI's role in creative work.
Google's new environmental report shows its electricity use climbed 37 percent in 2025 — its largest single-year jump ever, and more than 250 percent above 2019 — driven mostly by AI. The honest counterpoint: Google still cut operational emissions 2 percent by matching all that power with renewable purchases, and it signed over 12 gigawatts of new clean energy last year. Its own conclusion is the sobering line — the AI buildout "is currently accelerating faster than the grid is decarbonizing."