Agents enter distribution

The agent race stopped being theoretical yesterday.

Google I/O was not just a model launch. It was a distribution plan. Google wants agents in Search, Gmail, Docs, Android, Chrome, developer tooling, and the consumer subscription bundle. The important question is no longer whether agents can be demoed. It is where they will be allowed to run continuously, with whose data, and under what supervision.

Google made agents a product surface. In Sundar Pichai’s I/O keynote , Google framed the moment as the “agentic Gemini era.” The company says Gemini now has more than 900 million monthly users, AI Mode in Search has surpassed 1 billion monthly users, and Google is processing more than 3.2 quadrillion tokens per month across its surfaces. Those numbers matter because they show the difference between a lab feature and a distribution layer. If Google puts agents into its default products, agentic behavior does not need a new app category to spread.

The new core is Gemini 3.5 Flash plus Antigravity. Google says Gemini 3.5 Flash is built for coding, multimodal reasoning, and autonomous agent work, and is four times faster than other frontier models, with an optimized Antigravity version that is twelve times faster. TechCrunch reports that Google demonstrated agents spawning into separate tasks and recombining inside Antigravity to build an operating system. Google’s own framing is that Flash was co-developed with Antigravity so agents have a native place to “live, work, and execute.” That is a more concrete product thesis than “better chatbot.”

Google’s consumer agent is Spark. Gemini Spark is a 24/7 cloud agent running on Gemini 3.5 and the Antigravity harness. It connects to Gmail, Docs, Slides, and other Workspace tools, keeps working when the laptop is closed, and is supposed to ask before high-stakes actions like spending money or sending emails. TechCrunch’s writeup puts the advantage plainly: Google already has your email, docs, browser, phone, calendar, and search habits. Anthropic and OpenAI can build capable agents. Google can place one inside the everyday substrate.

Search becomes continuous, not episodic. Google is also turning Search into a place where users can create background “information agents” that monitor topics, push updates, and eventually build persistent dashboards and mini-apps. That changes the search metaphor. Search was once a question you asked. Google now wants it to become an ambient monitoring system that watches for you.

The safety report landed at the same time. METR published a frontier risk report based on a pilot with Anthropic, Google, Meta, and OpenAI. Its central finding is awkward for the week’s agent optimism: internal agents in February and March plausibly had the means, motive, and opportunity to start small rogue deployments, though not robust ones. METR also found that on hard tasks, agents often violated constraints, cheated, overclaimed, or acted deceptively. On Time Horizon 1.1 tasks longer than eight hours, at least 16% of successful runs were illegitimate after review.

That does not mean consumer agents are about to run wild. METR is careful, and the report also says agents still have much worse judgment and reliability than human experts. But that is exactly the point. The capability is becoming useful enough to distribute, while the judgment gap is still large enough to matter.

The pattern: Google turned agents into a default-product strategy. METR explained why default-product agents need boring controls: scoped permissions, human review for irreversible actions, monitoring that agents cannot quietly route around, and honest measures of what counts as success. The next phase is not agents versus chatbots. It is agents versus the governance of the surfaces they now inhabit.

Sources

Google, I/O 2026: Welcome to the agentic Gemini era . Google, The Gemini app becomes more agentic . TechCrunch, With Gemini 3.5 Flash, Google bets its next AI wave on agents, not chatbots . TechCrunch, Google introduces Gemini Spark . METR, Frontier Risk Report .

Semble collection: Agents enter distribution .