Google didn’t hold back at I/O 2026 on Monday. Here’s what matters — and why Claude users should pay attention.
Gemini 3.5 Flash: Faster Than Everything Else
Gemini 3.5 Flash is Google’s new workhorse model. According to Google, it beats its predecessor 3.1 Pro on coding, agentic tasks, and multimodal benchmarks — at four times the output speed. It’s been rolling out since May 19 in the Gemini app, Search, Antigravity 2.0, and the Gemini API.
Gemini 3.5 Pro, the heavier model, is already being used internally but won’t be available to the wider public until next month.
Gemini Spark: The Agent That Never Sleeps
The biggest announcement is Gemini Spark — Google’s answer to OpenAI’s Operator and the most ambitious agent product any AI lab has unveiled so far. Spark runs 24/7 on virtual machines in Google Cloud, working autonomously across Google Workspace, third-party apps, and the open web.
Imagine telling Spark to run a market analysis, and finding a finished document in your Google Drive the next morning. It reads emails, searches the web, fills out spreadsheets — all without you being there.
Spark launches next week in beta for Google AI Ultra subscribers in the US.
New Pricing: AI Ultra at $100/month
Google also revamped its pricing. AI Ultra now costs $100/month (down from the previous $250 top-tier plan, which drops to $200). That gets you 5x higher usage limits than the $20 plan, 20 terabytes of cloud storage, and YouTube Premium.
Gemini Omni: Creation Meets Reasoning
Then there’s Gemini Omni — a model system that combines Google’s reasoning capabilities with creative output. Omni Flash accepts images, audio, video, and text, and produces video grounded in real-world knowledge.
What This Means for Claude
Google just dropped a direct competitor to Cowork and Managed Agents with Spark. And with Gemini 3.5 Flash, they’ve got a model that’s gunning for Claude Sonnet on both price and performance.
Competition is getting fiercer — and that’s good for all of us. The more these labs push each other, the better the tools we use every day become. But here’s the thing: showing off an agent on stage is one thing. Making it work reliably in the real world is another. The next few months will tell us whether Spark lives up to the promise.
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