By Matt G. Southern
Publication Date: 2026-05-25 11:45:00
Google CEO Sundar Pichai acknowledged the company is “a bit behind” the frontier on agentic coding.
Pichai called coding “very foundational” to Google’s AI work. He made the comments on the New York Times Hard Fork podcast. The interview came days after Google’s I/O developer conference.
Where Google Sees The Gap
When asked about Google’s position in the AI race, Pichai highlighted areas of strength and those where Google trails.
Google’s models are “very capable” on text, multimodality, voice, audio, and reasoning, he said. But in agentic coding, tool use, instruction following, and long-horizon tasks, Google is “a bit behind at this moment.”
On what that looks like for developers, Pichai drew a clearer line. Google has been strong at creating single-shot web front ends. The gap is in longer-running tasks, where developers work on complex codebases.
Pichai said:
“There is a gap to the frontier where others are, but we are working, you know, we are well…
