Google Engineering Blog & Tech Articles

HeyGen ported their 18B+ parameter Avatar IV video generation model to Google Cloud's Trillium (v6e) TPUs via torchax and XLA, utilizing FSDP and Ulysses sequence parallelism across an eight-chip mesh. To achieve a 1.86x speedup for real-time streaming, the engineering team pipelined exposed all-to-all collectives, aligned sparse attention block sizes to eliminate mask padding, and bypassed softmax serial dependencies using a precomputed Cauchy-Schwarz upper bound. These custom Pallas kernel and compiler optimizations were deployed only after passing rigorous two-tier quality gates to guarantee byte-identical or mathematically equivalent pixel outputs.

Credentio is a newly released, open-source C++ library from Google that allows developers to integrate high-performance, local-first validation of C2PA Content Credentials into their client and server applications. By processing assets entirely locally with a highly optimized memory footprint, the library delivers instant validation verdicts for multi-gigabyte media files without incurring cloud latency, bandwidth costs, or data privacy risks. The library currently features deep manifest parsing alongside configurable trust list integration, and is available now on Google Source with future plans to support full credential generation and embedding.

Deploying secure, real-time Edge AI on Raspberry Pi is now simplified using LiteRT and lightweight Gemma open models. LiteRT optimizes CPU and GPU performance, delivering fast token speeds for models like Gemma4, enabling real-time local reasoning for robotics. Developers can quickly convert, quantize, and run these models using the lightweight LiteRT CLI tool. Support for Hailo AI accelerators is also coming very soon.

As AI coding assistants shift the developer's primary role from writing boilerplate to reviewing and maintaining systems, language choice becomes critical for long-term architectural integrity. Go directly addresses this new paradigm by utilizing its strict compiler, integrated toolchain, and uncompromising readability to provide deterministic guardrails that help AI models self-correct and generate highly standardized code. By enforcing ecosystem-wide consistency and strict backward compatibility, the Go platform empowers engineering teams to efficiently verify, optimize, and maintain high-velocity, AI-generated output in production environments.

Agent Plugins 1.0.0 is a new, vendor-neutral directory specification—backed by Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and others—for packaging Agent Skills and MCP servers into a single portable unit. By standardizing the manifest (plugin.json) and utilizing a fixed directory layout, it eliminates the need for developers to maintain separate wrappers or configurations to support different AI coding agents and IDEs. Google has officially joined as a Core Maintainer and already rolled out support in the Agents CLI and Data Agent Kit, allowing developers to start building and distributing interoperable plugins today.

The 2026-07-28 Model Context Protocol (MCP) specification replaces legacy stateful constraints with a fully stateless core, enabling cloud-native horizontal scaling, serverless deployments, and standard round-robin load balancing. This architectural shift introduces standardized HTTP headers for efficient routing without deep packet inspection, caching controls, and Multi Round-Trip Requests (MRTR) to handle interactive and long-running tasks without blocking connections. Developers can immediately begin migrating their agentic applications to this highly scalable infrastructure using the newly available beta SDKs for Python, TypeScript, Go, and C#.

Google Cloud API Gateway now offers a model routing feature in Public Preview, allowing developers to dynamically route traffic to models like Gemini, Claude, or OpenAI OSS-GPT without hardcoding endpoints or managing open-source proxies. Developers can easily configure these routing rules directly within their OpenAPI 3.x specifications by mapping virtual model names to specific backend targets on a shared host. Once deployed, the Gateway acts as a serverless ingress layer that accepts standard OpenAI-compatible requests, automatically transcodes the payload to the native schema of the target model, and routes the traffic on the fly.

Real-time AI agents break traditional request-response load balancing paradigms because they rely on long-lived, stateful bidirectional streams that obscure true server capacity. To solve this, developers must implement application-level session tracking directly within the runtime to accurately measure the committed concurrent workload of active conversations. By feeding these precise session counts alongside standard CPU utilization metrics into a hybrid routing algorithm, infrastructure can effectively distribute stateful AI traffic and prevent individual backend bottlenecks.

Agent Platform's evaluation service is now generally available, providing developers with a unified engine to measure agent quality consistently across local development experiments and live production traffic. You can evaluate agents using over 20 pre-built metrics, DeepMind-backed adaptive rubrics, or custom code-based and LLM-as-a-judge metrics stored in a centralized, versioned registry. The service integrates directly into existing workflows via the Agent Platform SDK, agents-cli, and ADK, offering built-in user and environment simulators to automate complex multi-turn testing and streamline CI pipelines.

To prevent context window bloat and reduce token consumption, Genkit Go introduces Agent Skills based on a progressive disclosure architecture. Developers can package specialized instructions, scripts, and references into modular SKILL.md bundles where only the frontmatter metadata is initially exposed to the agent's system prompt. When a task matches the skill's description, Genkit's middleware dynamically loads the full instruction body and associated assets, ensuring the model accesses precise workflows exactly when needed.

Google's open-source TPU microbenchmark suite provides developers with granular performance metrics across Network, Compute, HBM, Host Transfer, and Attention components to validate real-world hardware capabilities. By leveraging these benchmarks to establish a Roofline model, engineers can accurately diagnose whether their machine learning workloads are compute-, memory-, or network-bound. This empirical baseline directly guides targeted software optimizations—such as kernel tuning, mesh sharding, and rematerialization—to maximize hardware utilization for large-scale model deployments.

This second installment explores how Ray’s higher-level libraries—Serve, Data, and Train—abstract the complexities of running AI workloads on Google's TPU slices. Ray Serve uses a simple topology configuration to correctly gang-schedule large multi-host models, while Ray Data eliminates data-loading bottlenecks by feeding accelerators directly with native JAX batches. Finally, JaxTrainer streamlines distributed training across TPUs by automatically handling cross-slice coordination, checkpointing, and fault tolerance.

Tunix is Google’s new JAX-native post-training library designed to eliminate TPU idling bottlenecks when training multi-turn, tool-using LLM reasoning agents. It maximizes hardware throughput by combining highly concurrent, asynchronous rollouts with a decoupled producer-consumer pipeline, ensuring the trainer is constantly fed even while agents wait on network I/O or environment steps. Additionally, Tunix provides plug-and-play abstractions and continuous macro-level profiling, allowing developers to easily integrate custom open-source environments and optimize complex distributed workflows without massive code rewrites.

Ray 2.55 introduces official, first-class support for Google Cloud TPUs, enabling developers to run distributed Python workloads on Google's accelerators using the familiar Ray task-and-actor APIs. To handle the strict networking requirement of keeping multi-host TPU "slices" together over their Inter-Chip Interconnect (ICI), the KubeRay Operator on GKE automatically provisions and labels the underlying hardware layout. Ray Core utilizes these labels via its slice_placement_group() primitive to atomically reserve complete slices, allowing developers to deploy jobs through KubeRay, Ray Train, or Ray Serve simply by declaring a hardware topology (like "4x4") without writing custom placement code.

Conductor has evolved from a Gemini CLI extension into a portable plugin, bringing conversational Spec-Driven Development (SDD) to ecosystems like Antigravity CLI and Claude. Rather than relying on strict command sequences, developers can now chat naturally with their AI assistant while it dynamically manages persistent markdown artifacts (like spec.md and plan.md) in the background. This update eliminates workflow friction while ensuring your repository remains a version-controlled, single source of truth for your project's architecture and state across different AI tools.

Google Cloud has partnered with Parallel Web Systems to natively integrate Parallel's search infrastructure as a web grounding provider on the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform. This integration enables developers to anchor their AI agents in verifiable, real-time web results, significantly improving factual accuracy for complex enterprise workflows. Additionally, the partnership offers expanded architectural flexibility, allowing users to programmatically extract, permanently cache, and process web data alongside other large language models.

To resolve the scaling bottlenecks and runtime errors caused by monolithic system prompts, engineering teams should treat prompts as build artifacts by modularizing instructions into reusable templates. By running these modular "skill files" through a transpiler, developers can enforce static validation, catch missing dependencies at build time, and integrate prompt generation directly into their CI/CD pipelines. This deterministic approach prevents code drift and ultimately establishes a safe framework where agents can propose updates to their own logic via standard pull requests.

We're excited to introduce LiteRT.js, the newest member of the LiteRT family! LiteRT.js is our powerful solution for running machine learning models directly in the browser, extending Google's cross-platform edge AI runtime to the web. Built for JavaScript developers, LiteRT.js delivers state-of-the-art ML model inference performance on WebGPU and upcoming WebNN, with a fallback to WebAssembly for CPU. This post provides a quick tour of LiteRT.js and gives web developers everything they need to get started.

On May 23, 2026, fresh off the stage at Google I/O, our Google Developer Experts (GDEs) converged on...

Distributed AI training is notoriously fragile because losing a single machine typically crashes the entire multi-node job, forcing a time-consuming, full-workload infrastructure restart. To address this, Google’s JAX ecosystem utilizes elastic training via Pathways, which converts a hardware failure into a catchable Python exception so the running process can survive. When an unplanned failure occurs, the system automatically replaces only the broken worker, restores the last viable checkpoint from Cloud Storage, and resumes training in place—minimizing total downtime to under two minutes without ever restarting the main controller process.

Answering the questions of "why we built ADK 2.0". This explains the rationale, some of the features, and why a developer should consider upgrading. This will be published the day after ADK go 2.0 launches.

The open-source Genkit framework has introduced the Agents API, a full-stack tool designed to simplify the complex plumbing of conversational AI by packaging message history, tool loops, and streaming into a single interface. The API supports flexible, server- or client-managed state persistence—allowing for advanced workflows like history branching, long-running detached tasks, and multi-agent coordination—while seamlessly connecting backends to frontends via a unified wire protocol. Currently available in preview for TypeScript and Go, it also integrates with the Genkit Developer UI to allow developers to easily test, debug, and inspect agent snapshots without writing client code.

The Google Cloud Workbench Notebooks extension for VS Code has officially launched, allowing developers to connect their local IDE to scalable, cloud-based Jupyter environments. This integration streamlines the machine learning lifecycle by eliminating context switching and providing direct access to high-performance Google Cloud infrastructure. To support transparency and community-driven innovation, the newly released extension is fully open-sourced and available on GitHub and the VS Code Marketplace.

The Agent Development Kit (ADK) for Go 2.0 has been released, introducing a first-class, graph-based workflow engine to help developers compose complex, multi-agent applications. This update adds built-in primitives for human-in-the-loop (HITL) orchestration, dynamic execution using plain Go code, and automated resilience features like exponential backoff retries. By unifying the execution model, both single-agent applications and intricate graphs now run on the same runtime, simplifying telemetry and state persistence.

Building AI agents often leaves developers uncertain if prompt tweaks to fix single errors will accidentally cause widespread regressions in production. To bridge this gap, Google has introduced a new developer skill for coding agents that automates a five-stage evaluation flywheel: preparing data, running inference, grading with adaptive AutoRaters, analyzing failure clusters, and executing targeted optimizations. Running continuously against production traffic or on-demand via synthetic scenarios, this tool allows developers to describe testing goals in plain language while an independent evaluation service safely validates and counts actual performance improvements.

AI coding agents are rapidly shifting from reactive assistants that complete tasks when prompted to ...

How a Python agent and a Go agent collaborate on contract compliance using the Agent2Agent protocolY...

Celebrating the first anniversary of the Agent-to-Agent (A2A) protocol, this blog post highlights how the framework enables autonomous AI agents to securely collaborate and hand off tasks without the rigidity of traditional APIs. By delegating complex workflows to specialized peer agents, A2A prevents context pollution, ensures data privacy, and simplifies application design through modularity. To demonstrate this ecosystem in action, the post spotlights FoldRun—an agentic interface for life sciences that orchestrates complex protein structure predictions—alongside diverse A2A use cases spanning commerce, data streaming, DevOps, and telecommunications.

An open specification for finding and verifying tools, skills, and agents across the web.Agents are ...

This post introduces three architectural patterns designed to integrate Model Context Protocol (MCP) Apps and Agent-to-User Interface (A2UI) to solve the tradeoff between highly custom iframe environments and native, declarative rendering. By combining these approaches, developers can serve native-feeling UIs directly over MCP servers, embed complex and stateful iframe apps securely inside declarative views, or inject generative UI components into legacy systems. Ultimately, these hybrid frameworks empower engineering teams to deliver secure, performant, and brand-consistent agentic user experiences tailored to their specific project constraints.

Google has officially launched the TPU Developer Hub, a centralized educational resource designed to help model builders and developers maximize the performance of Google Cloud TPUs. The hub offers code-first resources, open-source recipes, and deep-dive documentation covering hardware architecture, software optimization, debugging, parallelism, and networking. These materials are tailored for both human developers and AI-assisted tools to streamline everything from large-scale training to low-latency inference workloads.

Google is enhancing Sign in with Google by introducing new OIDC standard claims—specifically auth_time and amr (Authentication Methods Reference) to provide developers with deeper session metadata. These updates allow verified apps to verify the "freshness" of a user's login and the specific authentication methods used (such as MFA or hardware keys), enabling more dynamic, risk-based access controls. By leveraging these federated identity signals, platforms can better prevent account takeover and fraud while implementing granular security policies like step-up authentication for sensitive actions.

DiffusionGemma is an experimental text-generation model built on the Gemma 4 architecture that uses diffusion-based parallel generation instead of token-by-token autoregression, enabling much faster inference, bidirectional context awareness, and real-time self-correction while remaining deployable on consumer GPUs. Its architecture generates and refines 256-token blocks in parallel through iterative denoising, allowing it to handle complex constraint-based tasks such as Sudoku more effectively than traditional language models and demonstrating strong gains from fine-tuning. The model integrates with vLLM and other popular inference frameworks, giving developers access to a new non-autoregressive approach that combines high performance, efficient long-context scaling, and straightforward customization and deployment.

Google has announced the Google Colab Command-Line Interface (CLI), a new tool that allows developers and AI agents to connect local terminals to remote Colab runtimes for frictionless execution. The lightweight CLI enables users to easily request high-powered GPUs, run local Python scripts remotely, and seamlessly retrieve artifact logs or models like fine-tuned Gemma 3 adapters. By integrating directly into standard terminal environments, the tool is highly programmable and ready to be used by AI agents such as Antigravity or Claude Code to manage complex machine learning pipelines.

Google DeepMind’s Gemma 4 12B model brings agentic, multimodal AI capabilities to everyday laptops with 16GB of RAM, enabling local data processing and visual insight generation. Users can leverage this model on macOS through the Google AI Edge Gallery for dynamic Python code execution and visualization, as well as via Google AI Edge Eloquent for completely offline voice dictation and text editing. Additionally, developer workflows are enhanced by the LiteRT-LM CLI's new serve command, which creates an industry-compatible local endpoint to power fully-local AI tools and agents.

The newly released Gemma 4 12B is a dense, multimodal model designed for high-performance local AI execution on consumer devices. By introducing a novel, encoder-free architecture, it bypasses traditional visual and audio encoders to feed multimodal data directly into the LLM backbone.

The Google Tunix Hackathon on Kaggle challenged developers to transform small, non-reasoning base models into general reasoning engines using Kaggle TPUs and a limited compute budget. The winning teams achieved this by implementing multi-stage post-training pipelines that combined Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) with advanced alignment techniques like GRPO and SimPO. Ultimately, the competition democratized AI development by proving that highly capable, structured reasoning models can be successfully trained by the community using accessible, open-source resources.

Google has announced the new Google Pay & Wallet Developer MCP server, an open-standard tool designed to securely connect AI development assistants and IDEs with real-time API and account context. The server allows developers to remain within their development environment to search official documentation, validate Wallet pass definitions, check integration status, and manage merchant accounts. Ultimately, this integration aims to reduce friction and accelerate development workflows by minimizing context switching and providing up-to-date, grounded AI support.

Google Pay is evolving for "agentic commerce" by introducing the Universal Commerce Protocol and a new MCP server that allows AI agents to manage integrations and analyze trends. New Android updates introduce dynamic callbacks for seamless express checkouts and extend payment support into social media apps via WebViews. Additionally, the platform is launching cross-device biometric authentication and new transaction signals to help merchants reduce friction and optimize processing costs.

We are excited to bring Express checkout with Google Pay for Android native apps enabling developers...

Google is expanding its smart home ecosystem by launching a full-stack Gemini AI offering that integrates advanced camera intelligence, natural language queries, and daily activity summaries. This initiative provides service providers and hardware manufacturers with turnkey reference designs and APIs to build proactive, branded services without extensive research and development. Ultimately, the program aims to move beyond basic device control toward an AI-native home that can understand context and care for users' needs in real time.

Google has announced the launch of version 0.1.0 of the Agent Development Kit (ADK) for Kotlin, alongside a specialized ADK library for Android. This open-source framework simplifies the creation of AI agents by managing complex orchestration, session sharing, and error handling across cloud and edge environments. The release supports hybrid orchestration, enabling developers to build multi-agent systems where a cloud-based model can seamlessly offload specific tasks to local, on-device models like Gemini Nano to enhance user privacy.

Google announced the transition from assistive AI to independent agents, highlighting the launch of the Gemini 3.5 series and major updates to its Antigravity agent-first development platform. For mobile developers, the post introduces new Android CLI tools, the Android Bench evaluation leaderboard, and an automated Migration agent designed to rapidly convert various frameworks into native Kotlin code. Web development is also being transformed through Chrome DevTools for agents, the HTML-in-Canvas API, and the proposal of WebMCP, an open web standard that enables browser-based AI agents to execute complex tasks.

The Google AI Edge Gallery app has expanded its on-device AI capabilities by introducing experimental support for the open-source Model Context Protocol (MCP) on Android, allowing Gemma 4 to coordinate complex tasks across external data sources like Google Workspace and Google Maps. To enable more proactive and persistent user interactions, the update adds a "Schedule Notification" skill for automating routines and a persistent chat history feature that restores long session contexts nearly instantly. Driven by an open-source toolkit, the platform encourages community developers to build and share custom utility-focused workflows, prompt configurations, and tool integrations via its GitHub repository.

Google is unifying its AI terminal tools by transitioning the community-focused Gemini CLI into Antigravity CLI, a new agent-first platform built for complex, multi-agent workflows. This new Go-based tool offers faster execution, asynchronous processing, and a unified architecture that syncs with the Antigravity 2.0 desktop application. While enterprise customers will maintain existing access, individual and free users must transition to the new platform before Gemini CLI stops serving requests on June 18, 2026.

Google AI Edge’s LiteRT-LM provides a production-proven, highly optimized infrastructure for running Gemma 4 across cross-platform mobile and edge environments. It actively unlocks the model's native multimodal and agentic features on-device by utilizing memory-efficient dynamic loading, Multi-Token Prediction for up to a 2.2x speedup, and advanced orchestration tools like Thinking Mode and Constrained Decoding. Furthermore, the engine is rapidly expanding its integration surfaces beyond Android, introducing new native Swift APIs for Apple ecosystems and WebGPU-accelerated JavaScript APIs for high-performance, serverless browser inference.

The Google Cloud and NVIDIA developer community is celebrating its first anniversary with 100,000 members and a renewed focus on providing builders with advanced AI infrastructure and resources. To accelerate development, the community offers curated learning pathways for mastering LLM optimization, GPU-accelerated data analytics, and monthly expert-led webinars. Moving into its second year, the initiative will expand to include hands-on labs, engineering events, and specialized content focused on the growth of agentic AI.

The Google Tensor ML SDK is graduating to its Beta phase, allowing developers to build and deploy high-performance machine learning models directly onto the TPU of Google Pixel 10 devices. By integrating with LiteRT, Google's edge deployment framework, the SDK provides a unified workflow for developers to convert, compile, and run PyTorch or TFLite models with robust fallback options. Additionally, a new model garden offers over 100 classic and generative AI models, including Gemma 3, enabling low-latency, private features like speech recognition, computer vision, and text generation.

Integration of Arm Scalable Matrix Extension 2 (SME2) and the Google AI Edge software stack enables high-performance, on-device generative AI by turning the CPU into a powerful matrix-compute accelerator. Using Stability AI’s "stable-audio-open-small" model as a case study, it outlines a streamlined "Convert, Optimize, and Deploy" pipeline that utilizes LiteRT, XNNPACK, and KleidiAI to automate hardware acceleration. The resulting implementation achieves over a 2x speedup in audio generation and a 4x reduction in memory usage while maintaining high audio quality on Arm-powered mobile devices and laptops.

Genkit is an open-source framework designed to help developers build production-ready, agentic AI applications using TypeScript, Go, Dart, and Python. The framework utilizes a powerful middleware system that intercepts generation calls to inject custom behaviors like retries, model fallbacks, and human-in-the-loop tool approvals. By attaching hooks at the generate, model, and tool layers, developers can ensure high reliability and deterministic control over model outputs. Furthermore, Genkit allows for the creation and stacking of custom middleware, all of which can be inspected and debugged through a dedicated Developer UI.