The race to develop useful AI agents is heating up, with Google stepping into the spotlight with its ambitious plans. While the tech giant has been a long-standing frontrunner in the AI race, it's now playing catch-up with the one-man team behind OpenClaw, an open-source AI agent platform that has gained millions of users since its launch last November. OpenClaw's success has forced all AI labs to take notice, and Google is now aiming to amplify its own AI capabilities by adopting some of the features that have fueled OpenClaw's success.
Google's strategy seems clear: to adopt some of the features that have helped fuel OpenClaw's success and amplify them with Google's deep knowledge of our digital presence. The company has announced new AI agents for gathering information, planning events, summarizing your inbox and calendar, and more. These agents can run continuously in the background, and the company claims they'll seamlessly integrate into Google's own tools and external ones.
One of Google's big bets this year is Gemini Spark, its new AI agent for consumers. Google promises Gemini Spark can perform tasks across Google's own services and more than 30 external partners coming soon, including Dropbox, Uber, and Spotify. Gemini Spark is cloud-based; it can run 24/7 without keeping a laptop open and can sync across the web, Android, and iOS. The agent rolls out to trusted testers this week, and a beta will be available in the US next week on Google's Ultra plan.
Google touts the typical uses for Gemini Spark, like shopping, researching, and coordinating with other people's schedules and plans. Google also hopes people will find their own uses. Josh Woodward, Google's Gemini app lead, says he's been using Gemini Spark to plan a neighborhood block party, deploying agents to track RSVPs and what attendees are bringing, send reminders, and figure out when his homeowners' association allows placing a giant inflatable. Outside Spark, Google is also introducing the Daily Brief, a morning update similar to OpenAI's ChatGPT Pulse.
Gemini Spark isn't available yet, but if it works the way Google says it does, it could be a big step forward for traditional tech companies' AI agents. Google's earliest agentic experiments completed tasks at a snail's pace while hijacking your browser. By last year's Gemini 3 release, its agents worked well for some jobs — like cleaning out an inbox — but still failed at others. Now, Google is taking a promising step by mirroring some key elements of OpenClaw: long-running agents that operate around the clock in the background, giving them the ability to have a lot more context about their tasks — and giving users the ability to text and email their agents directly.
Starting this summer, Google's AI search, too, is getting agents — and promising to finally do more than eat up screen real estate and recommend pizza with glue. Its 'information agents' are supposed to perform continuous background research — like tracking stock market shifts or weather for the best picnic day. If Google can't make AI agents useful, it won't have many excuses to fall back on.
Google also announced an expansion to Antigravity, the agentic development platform it introduced about six months ago. A new standalone Antigravity desktop app will serve as a central hub for agent interaction, and the whole system is now designed as a platform to build and manage autonomous agents, Google says. The expansion follows on the heels of similar tools from OpenAI and Anthropic, which have tried to broaden their successful coding services to more approachable tools for non-programmers.
All this will be underpinned by a new model series: Gemini 3.5, whose initial entry Gemini 3.5 Flash should be available next month. The model is supposed to have significantly better coding capabilities than Gemini 3, which was released to great fanfare last November. It's clearly intended to leapfrog updates from Anthropic, which is known for its coding prowess, and OpenAI. Gemini 3.5 Flash is especially good 'when deploying multiple agents simultaneously and completing long-running tasks,' Kavukcuoglu told reporters Monday. It's also supposed to be four times faster than other frontier models and less than half (or in some cases, one third of) the price — a fact that's relevant to 24/7 AI agents, with token costs that quickly add up.
In the world of AI agents, Google will still be playing catch-up with the one-man team behind OpenClaw. But it's a long-standing frontrunner in the AI race, and its app has the benefit of scale: It now serves more than 900 million users per month, executives told reporters on Monday, in more than 230 countries and more than 70 languages. Compared to dedicated AI companies under increasing financial pressure, it's able to at least temporarily subsidize costs to attract users. And while its agents haven't yet had to weather the real world, they're headed in a promising direction. If any AI company can make agents truly useful, it's Google. If it can't, it won't have many excuses to fall back on — and the whole idea might need a rethink.
