Google Pitches Its AI Coding Tools as the Cost-Effective Option

<p><b>Google</b> came into its flagship developer conference, <b>Google I/O</b>, on Tuesday with a big question to answer: Does it have a counter to Anthropic’s dominance in coding?</p><p>The takeaway, after a sweltering day in Mountain View, Calif.: Google wants to redefine the competition. Google didn’t release a new “pro” version of its flagship model, <b>Gemini</b>, to compete with Anthropic’s much hyped (though not yet widely released) <b>Mythos</b>. It teased a Pro model coming later, but Google's emphasis instead was on a smaller new model, <b>Gemini 3.5 Flash</b>, and its coding agent <b>Antigravity</b>, a combination that the company is betting can become a workhorse option for developers looking to save money, especially amid compute constraints and <a href="https://www.theinformation.com/articles/anthropic-flexes-pricing-power-customers-willingly-eat-cost?rc=n9lbpq">soaring prices from Anthropic</a>.&nbsp;</p><p>“The top companies in Google Cloud are processing about 1 trillion tokens a day,” said CEO <b>Sundar Pichai</b> on stage. “If they shifted 80% of their workloads from other frontier models to 3.5 Flash, they would save over $1 billion annually.”&nbsp;</p>