Google AI coding strike team's bold move to beat Anthropic

Google AI coding strike team is the company's latest high‑stakes bet in the race to build powerful AI tools that can write and maintain complex software.

Google DeepMind has formed a dedicated "strike team" of researchers and engineers to strengthen its AI coding models, following concern that rival Anthropic has pulled ahead with its Claude Code assistant. The initiative was first reported by The Information and is aimed at improving performance on long, multi-step coding tasks where current systems often struggle.

The group is led by Sebastian Borgeaud, who previously served as pre‑training lead for Google's Gemini models, underscoring how central the project is to the company's AI roadmap. Senior figures, including Google co‑founder Sergey Brin and DeepMind CTO Koray Kavukcuoglu, are said to be closely involved.

Anthropic has focused heavily on AI‑assisted programming with Claude Code, an agentic coding tool that can understand large codebases, edit files and run commands through natural language. The company has said that a majority of its own code is now written with the help of AI, highlighting how deeply such tools are woven into its engineering workflow.

This has added to the urgency inside Google, where internal sentiment holds that Anthropic's coding experience is currently ahead of Gemini's. External commentary has also framed Google's move as a structural response rather than a routine product update, intended to close what some describe as an "agentic coding gap."

AI‑assisted development is already significant inside Google. Chief financial officer Anat Ashkenazi recently said around half of the company's code is now written by AI coding agents before being reviewed by human engineers. That figure has climbed from "well over 30%" of new code in early 2025, reflecting a rapid shift in day‑to‑day software development.

Until now, many of Google's AI products were designed primarily for external customers, but the strike team is expected to push deeper internal adoption, supported by an internal leaderboard tracking how often staff use AI coding tools.

The Google AI coding strike team shows how far big tech is willing to go to automate programming and stay competitive. If the effort succeeds, Gemini‑powered tools could narrow the gap with Anthropic's Claude Code and make AI‑generated code an even larger share of Google's vast software stack. But the outcome of this race will hinge on whether these systems can reliably handle long‑term, mission‑critical work without eroding trust among human developers.