Google CEO Sundar Pichai has publicly acknowledged that his company is trailing competitors in agentic coding, the AI capability that has become the industry's most valuable market. Speaking on the Hard Fork podcast published by The New York Times, Pichai said Google's models lead in text, multimodality, voice, and reasoning, but fall behind in the long-horizon coding tasks that have made Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex industry standouts.

Why Is Agentic Coding Becoming the AI Industry's Most Valuable Battleground?

Coding has become where the money flows. Anthropic's revenue exploded on the back of Claude Code, while OpenAI pivoted from consumer to enterprise with Codex. The market opportunity is substantial: Mordor Intelligence expects the AI code tools market to grow from $9.3 billion this year to roughly $30 billion by 2031. Research cited by Wired found that developers work over 50 percent faster with an AI assistant, making this the real contest in artificial intelligence, not chatbot capabilities.

Pichai's explanation for Google's lag was blunt and focused on product strategy rather than model quality. "When it comes to agentic coding with tool use, instruction following and long-horizon tasks, I think we are a bit behind at this moment," he said. The core issue: Google never had the place where developers actually work, so it never accumulated the data flowing back from real-world usage. "We maybe didn't quite have the surface, like Claude Code as an example," Pichai acknowledged.

What Is Google's Answer to Claude Code?

Google unveiled its response at I/O 2026. Antigravity 2.0 shipped as a standalone desktop application with a command-line interface (CLI), a software development kit (SDK), and the ability to orchestrate multiple agents at once. Paired with Gemini 3.5 Flash, a new model co-developed with Antigravity, Google claims the system is 4 times faster than rival frontier models, with an optimized variant hitting 12 times faster performance.

During the presentation, engineer Varun Mohan demonstrated agents spawning off to build separate components of an operating system from scratch, a task Pichai said would take a person thousands of hours. However, the launch encountered friction. Tightened usage limits triggered developer complaints, and Google has since reset the quota. "That is rightfully a source of frustration when you encounter it," Pichai acknowledged.

How to Understand Google's Internal AI Adoption Metrics

• Internal Token Usage Growth: Pichai reported that token usage inside Google is doubling every week, a pace he said he has "never seen anything like it" in the company, suggesting rapid internal adoption of the new tools.
• Code Assistance Gap: Google's own CFO has stated that Anthropic writes close to 100 percent of its code with AI assistance, while Google sits at roughly 50 percent, revealing a significant operational difference between the two companies.
• Organizational Response: An AI coding strike team assembled in April, involving Sergey Brin and DeepMind CTO Koray Kavukcuoglu, is already being reorganized to focus on what Brin called the need to "urgently bridge the gap in agentic execution."

Pichai's evidence that the gap is closing rests on internal adoption metrics. Getting Antigravity into real-world use and pulling that data back in is what he expects will move the needle forward. However, the internal numbers cut both ways, showing both progress and persistent distance from competitors.

Price is another lever Google is pulling. The company introduced an AI Ultra tier at $100 per month at I/O and cut its top plan from $250 to $200, positioning itself as the cheaper option for heavy coding workloads. Pichai rejected the suggestion that Google's spread of bets across multiple AI projects is the problem. "I don't see it as an issue of focus," he told Hard Fork. "We are a large company, and we have scale, so we will be able to focus on multiple things at the same time." He described the tempo of the field in terms that read less like reassurance than warning: "30 to 60 days looks like five years".

"When it comes to agentic coding with tool use, instruction following and long-horizon tasks, I think we are a bit behind at this moment," said Sundar Pichai.

Sundar Pichai, CEO at Google

The admission lands awkwardly for Google. Pichai maintains that Google is the only large company genuinely at the frontier of AI, yet the frontier is being defined by two companies that picked one problem and refused to let go of it. The race to dominate agentic coding is reshaping how the entire AI industry allocates resources, with coding assistance now the clearest measure of which company has built the most useful artificial intelligence.