Google says Gemini 3.5 Flash rivals 'large flagship models' for coding and agentic tasks

Key points

• Google has unveiled Gemini 3.5, starting with the Gemini 3.5 Flash model that promises to outperform Gemini 3.1 Pro in real-world agentic and coding tasks.
• "3.5 Flash delivers frontier-level intelligence at exceptional speed — proving you no longer have to trade quality for latency." Announced at Google I/O 2026, this will be Google's default AI model (not to be confused with Flash-Lite), designed to deliver better speed than the current Gemini Pro models at a more affordable price.
• The tradeoff is lower performance than the 3.5 Pro model (coming next month) in tasks that require deep reasoning and high-context understanding.
• However, Google has reduced the compromise between the Pro and Flash models, saying Gemini 3.5 Flash "delivers intelligence that rivals large flagship models on multiple dimensions." It outperforms the current Gemini 3.1 Pro model on coding and agentic benchmarks like Terminal-Bench 2.1 (76.2 percent), MCP Atlas scaled tool use (83.6...