With Gemini 3.5 Flash, Google bets its next AI wave on agents, not chatbots

Google launched on Tuesday Gemini 3.5 Flash, a new AI model that the company says is its strongest yet for coding and autonomous AI agents. The model, which was introduced at the company’s annual Google I/O developer conference, can independently execute coding pipelines, manage research projects, and, in internal tests, build an operating system entirely from scratch. The release signals Google’s shift from pitching AI as a conversational tool to AI as an agentic tool. It’s not just answering questions, but planning, building, and iterating on real work with minimal human input. Koray Kavukcuoglu, DeepMind’s chief technologist, told reporters on Monday ahead of the public launch: “3.5 Flash offers an incredible combination of quality and low latency. It outperforms our latest frontier model, 3.1 Pro, on nearly all the benchmarks,” including coding, agentic tasks, and multimodal reasoning. He added that it is 4x faster than other frontier models, a speed that’s ideal for coding and agentic tasks, but that Google has “taken it to another level” by developing an optimized version of Flash that’s 12x faster with the same quality. That speed is central to Flash’s design for agentic work, where multiple AI agents run at the same time on long-running tasks, according to Kavukcuoglu. Onstage at I/O, Google engineer Varun Mohan, demonstrated agents spawning off to work on separate components before coming together to build a full operating system inside Antigravity, the company’s agentic development platform and IDE. Image Credits:Google Kavukcuoglu said Flash 3.5 was co-developed with Antigravity so that agents could have a “native environment where they can live, work, and execute.” At I/O, Google released Antigravity 2.0, a stand-alone desktop application designed around agent-first development. The gains are showing up beyond demos. Google says 3.5 Flash’s agentic capabilities are already creating impact among partners, like banks and fintechs automating multi-week workflows, or data science teams finding insights in complex data environments. The model can run autonomously for multiple hours, though Tulsee Doshi, Google’s senior director and head of product, said it will at times pause and ask for user input when it hits a decision point or permission issue that requires human judgment. When Google releases its forthcoming 3.5 Pro model, the two are designed to work in tandem. Doshi told TechCrunch that “3.5 Pro becomes your orchestrator, your planner, and then it actually can leverage Flash to be the various sub-agents. I think it really comes down to where do you really want that reasoning power, where you actually want that larger model that can really push on the reasoning side versus where do you have tasks that really do merit good brute force tool use capabilities?” Now, 3.5 Flash is the default model in the Gemini app and in AI Mode in Search globally. At I/O, Google also announced agentic capabilities coming to Search, letting users create, customize, and manage AI agents directly on the platform. The new model will also power Gemini Spark, Google’s new personal AI agent designed to run 24/7 to help consumers manage their digital life. Providing that level of AI capability for average consumers comes with scrutiny. Google is currently facing a lawsuit after a man nearly committed a mass casualty event and died by suicide following weeks of chatting with Gemini last year. The implications for harm only grow when making powerful autonomous agents available more broadly. Google says Gemini 3.5 has strengthened cyber and CBRN (chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear) safeguards and is better calibrated to engage with sensitive questions rather than refuse them outright. Gemini 3.5 Flash is available generally today via Antigravity, the Gemini API, and Gemini Enterprise, as well as through the Gemini app and AI mode in Search.