When Google opens its doors for its annual developer conference, I/O, it does so as a clear third place in the foundation model race. A year ago, at Google I/O 2025, the situation looked very different: the company was riding high from the launch of Gemini 2.5 Pro that March, and distinguishing among top-tier LLMs often felt like subjective hair-splitting.
But a foundation model’s reputation these days rests largely on its coding capabilities, and for months Google’s coding tools have been outgunned by Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex. Those systems are so dramatically superior that Google has reportedly had to allow some engineers at DeepMind to use Claude for their work—lest they fall farther behind.
At the conference in Mountain View, observers will be on the lookout for any efforts Google is making to claw its way back into frontrunner position. Beyond that, the focus remains on areas where Google shapes the cutting edge, such as AI for science—moves that may receive less hype but remain highly consequential.
Google is taking its AI coding crisis seriously. According to reporting from The Information, there’s a new AI coding team at DeepMind. Notably, John Jumper, who shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in chemistry for the protein structure software AlphaFold, is lending his talents to these efforts. A major new coding release at I/O is highly anticipated, potentially in the form of an update to the company’s Antigravity agentic coding platform.
That said, transformative results may be slow to materialize. Googlers have access to models substantially ahead of public releases, yet they were reportedly fighting for Claude Code access as recently as last month. Unless the company has made astonishing progress since then, Google probably won’t leapfrog back to the coding frontier overnight.
While coding is a current weakness, science remains Google DeepMind’s conspicuous strength. It is the only frontier AI company to have earned a Nobel Prize. As LLMs dominate the AI-for-science landscape, Google has solidified its lead. Last year, the company released multiple scientific AI tools, including the AI co-scientist, which formulates hypotheses and has been described as an “oracle” by Stanford researchers, and AlphaEvolve, a system for discovering mathematical solutions.
