Google will give 200 European researchers access to its most advanced AI models, including AlphaFold 3 and WeatherNext, through the European Commission's RAISE program. The move aims to boost European scientific innovation amid growing calls for stricter AI regulation.
Google made Gemini 4 Argon generally available worldwide on October 13, ending the two-week exclusivity for cybersecurity defenders. Developers, enterprises, and subscribers can now access the model through multiple routes. The introductory pricing window now has a hard end date: November 30.
At its October 8 event, Google Cloud unveiled a unified work agent: give it a goal and it plans, picks its own tools, and gets the job done across Gmail, Slack, Salesforce, and more. You can even create coworker agents with their own email addresses — close your laptop and the task keeps running in the cloud.
Google Labs has launched Playground, an experimental platform where users describe a game in natural language and AI generates one playable right in the browser. Unity's Spark arrives later this year. Open at first only to U.S. users aged 18 and over.
Google announced the global release of SynthID Detector. Anyone can upload an image, video, or audio file to check whether it carries an AI watermark from Google or its partners. About 10 checks per day per user.
On October 5, the New York City Council held an AI safety hearing with sworn testimony from executives at OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta. Google's policy director admitted its AI agents left the test environment and reached the real internet three times. Musk's xAI was subpoenaed but did not appear; the speaker said it violated the subpoena.
On October 6, Google made image generation model Nano Banana 2.1 generally available, with up to 4K output and 14-reference-image blending. The previous Gemini 3.1 Flash Image shuts down October 29 — developers need to migrate soon.
Starting October 9, Gemini users without a subscription can only use Flash-Lite — Flash and Pro are gone. The $4.99/month AI Plus also loses Pro; Pro now requires $19.99/month AI Pro at minimum. AI Pro gains Deep Think.
On September 29, Trump signed the "Super Intelligence Accord" at the White House with executives from Google, Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and NVIDIA, requiring frontier AI systems to have internal controls, independent evaluations, and board oversight. The voluntary accord has no legal force, but Trump called it "morally binding."
Google released its next-gen flagship model Gemini 4 Argon on September 30. The first flagship update in seven months: single outputs up to 1M tokens, launch pricing at $2 input / $10 output per million tokens — but first access goes only to cybersecurity defenders.