Alphabet chief executive Sundar Pichai used the company's earnings call on Wednesday to mount a forceful defence of Google's AI strategy, pushing back against investor concerns that the search giant has fallen behind rivals after delaying a flagship model.
Google postponed the release of Gemini 3.5 Pro, a model originally slated for June that was expected to strengthen the company's position in AI coding and autonomous agent tasks, two of the most fiercely contested areas in the industry. The delay has fuelled worries that Google is losing momentum as OpenAI, Anthropic and Chinese competitors accelerate their pace of model releases.
On the call, Pichai struck an unusually defensive tone. "We've had clearly frontier models. There are many attributes on which we are still at the frontier; there are areas where we've acknowledged we need to improve and coding and agentic coding is an example of that," he told analysts.
Rather than dwell on the Gemini 3.5 Pro delay, Pichai highlighted Gemini Flash, Google's cheaper and faster model, which now powers a growing range of applications including cybersecurity, customer service and analytics. He also said the Gemini 4 roadmap involves releases at an almost monthly cadence.
Shares dropped more than 3 percent after hours and have fallen roughly 9 percent since April. Alphabet raised its capital expenditure plans to a range of $195 billion to $205 billion.