Anthropic released Claude Fable 5.1 on 9/1: base input/output pricing is unchanged at $10/$50 per million tokens, but cache reads dropped from $1.00 to $0.25 (↓75%), saving up to 45% on cache-heavy agentic workloads. Google released Gemini 3.8 Flash on 9/2 at an introductory $0.75/$3.75, good only through 2026-12-31 — standard pricing doubles to $1.50/$7.50 starting 2027-01-01.
Gemini Omni 1.1 Flash (gemini-omni-1.1-flash): GA since 2026-08-27, replacing the preview that launched 6/30; closed-source, priced per output second: $0.03 at 360p, $0.10 at 720p (default), $0.15 at 1080p, $0.30 at 4K (1080p/4K are upscaled); ranks #1 on the Artificial Analysis Text-to-Video Arena without audio (1322 Elo) and #2 with audio (1237, trailing Wan3.0's 1241); adds scene extension (10s of context, chainable up to 40s total) and first/last-frame interpolation for camera control
Google Cloud added Flexible Savings Plans for Gemini Enterprise (spend-based monthly commitment, 10% off for 1-year, 20% off for 3-year, no minimum or maximum), a new pay-as-you-go consumption edition, and an upcoming off-peak batch processing option (up to 50% off inference cost), effective 2026-08-26. Unlike OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol sticker-price cut, this doesn't touch list prices at all — it's a whole new billing toolkit. Where OpenAI is fighting a price war, Google is fighting a FinOps-governance war.
Agent Plugins 1.0 is a packaging format that bundles Agent Skills (markdown instructions) and MCP server configs into a single directory, loadable by ChatGPT, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Kiro, and VS Code. It's not a new protocol — it's the wrapper above protocols. Vercel initiated it, OpenAI/AWS/Microsoft/Cursor co-authored it, and Google joined on launch day. Anthropic isn't on the governance board, but MCP is a core primitive of the spec.
A2UI is an agent generative UI protocol open-sourced by Google on 2025-12-15: agents send declarative JSON describing UI intent, and clients render it natively using their own component catalog whitelist, layered on top of A2A. It launched at format v0.8 and iterated to v0.9 within three months.
Antigravity CLI is a terminal agent Google announced at I/O on May 19, 2026. Written in Go (versus Gemini CLI's Node.js), its binary is called agy, and it shares the same agent harness as the desktop Antigravity 2.0. It is also Gemini CLI's successor — the personal-tier Gemini CLI service ends on June 18, 2026.
notebooklm-py reverse-engineers Google's batchexecute RPC protocol, letting you programmatically control NotebookLM via Python / CLI / AI Agent — including audio, video, slides, quiz generation and more.
Top Silicon Valley companies are independently building internal AI coding agents that automate everything from a Slack message to a merged PR. This article deep-dives into architectures from Stripe, Ramp, Coinbase, and Spotify, then expands to cover Google, Meta, Amazon, Uber, Goldman Sachs, Walmart, and more.
The paying paths on Google's side: the individual free tier and Gemini CLI access on Google AI Pro / Ultra ended 2026/6/18, leaving individuals with Antigravity CLI or their own paid API key; enterprise licenses and Google Cloud are unaffected. The zero-cost starting option now belongs to someone else.
Gemini CLI is Google's open source terminal AI agent (Apache 2.0, ~106.6k stars). It once offered 60 requests per minute and 1,000 per day for free, with a 1M context window. The individual tier stopped serving on 2026/6/18 and Antigravity CLI took over. The project isn't shut down — the repo is still maintained — but it now serves only Gemini Code Assist Standard/Enterprise licenses and paid API keys.
Google outlined eight multi-agent design patterns: from the simplest Sequential Pipeline to the composable Composite Pattern. More complexity isn't always better — picking the right pattern matters more than stacking agents.