Google CFO Anat Ashkenazi revealed in early 2026 that 50% of Google's code is now written by AI agents. That figure might sound impressive until compared with Anthropic: Claude Code head Boris Cherny says 100% of his own code is produced by Claude, and the company as a whole is 'almost 100%.' The gap set off alarm bells inside Google.
According to The Information, Google DeepMind has quietly formed a 'Strike Team' of top researchers and engineers to directly respond to Anthropic's competitive threat.
Led by former Gemini pre-training lead, with Brin directly involved
The team is headed by Sebastian Borgeaud, previously responsible for pre-training Gemini models. The logic is clear: he knows the ceiling of Gemini and where breakthroughs are needed. Co-founder Sergey Brin and DeepMind CTO Koray Kavukcuoglu are also personally involved, unusual for Google's culture. In a memo to DeepMind staff, Brin wrote: 'To win the final sprint, we must urgently close the agent execution gap and transform the model into the primary developer.'
Focus on long-horizon programming, not simple autocomplete
The Strike Team's technical emphasis is long-horizon programming: making models understand large codebases, grasp developer intent, and output complete software modules. Google has even set up an internal AI coding tool usage leaderboard, and Brin has mandated that employees use internal agent tools for multi-step tasks. The team is training proprietary models on Google's own codebase—these won't be released due to trade secrets but will serve as a stepping stone to improve public models. Apple is taking a similar approach with its internal tools.
But the pressure goes beyond market competition: Claude Code has become one of the most-used external AI coding tools among Google engineers, per a report from Medium. Staffers are quietly using a competitor's product to fill gaps in their own company's offerings—a signal the leadership can't ignore.
For Google, the race starts from an asymmetric position: Anthropic is a native AI-coding company, while Google is a tech giant trying to reinvent itself with AI. Size brings inertia but also resources. The Strike Team represents Google's choice to carve a fast lane inside the bureaucracy rather than waiting for organization-wide transformation.