Google reshuffles its AI coding team as it struggles to catch Anthropic

What happened

Reports surfaced this week that Google's coding strike team has been restructured, with co-founder Sergey Brin and DeepMind CTO Koray Kavukcuoglu personally overseeing efforts to close the gap with Anthropic.

Context and impact

Coding is the highest-value enterprise wedge in generative AI, and Anthropic's Claude has clearly pulled ahead in benchmarks and developer mindshare. Brin and Kavukcuoglu personally taking over an internal tooling team is unusual for Google and signals that the company sees the gap as an existential strategic risk. The talent exodus also reveals a deeper philosophical split within DeepMind between commercial coding work and longer-horizon "world model" research.

Details

• Strike team is led by Sebastian Borgeaud (formerly Gemini 3 pretraining)
• A new midtraining phase is added between pretraining and post-training
• Sergey Brin's internal memo demands urgent closure of the "agentic execution" gap
• Denny Zhou (founder of Google Brain's reasoning team) joined Meta Superintelligence Lab — the move was only confirmed after four months
• Anthropic says nearly 100% of its code is now AI-written; Google CFO Ashkenazi put the figure around 50%
• Markets wiped ~$269B off Alphabet's market cap during the June 18–24 talent-loss wave