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It’s peak developer conference season, and AI announcements are flying in fast.
Google, Microsoft, Anthropic, and OpenAI have all elbowed each other to release news of their latest models, partnerships, and tools as the race to own generative AI remains as intense as ever.
A big theme of all of this news, like much of the AI hype these days, was agents—task-specific AI tools that can act beyond the realm of a chatbot—whether they’re helping consumers shop or book tickets, or workers code or make sales.
But companies diverged around how much emphasis they put on AI for use at home versus at the office. The Economist reported that some companies may be growing disillusioned with offerings in the latter category.
Here are some recent highlights from the AI world:
- Anthropic, which has carved out a lane for its safety consciousness, released Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4. But it was details in the release notes that grabbed the most attention: In safety testing, Opus 4 tried to blackmail people it believed were going to shut it down. In another test, Opus 4 tried to whistleblow on a hypothetical pharmaceutical company committing fraud by emailing regulators and news outlets including investigative site ProPublica. The company is thus releasing the model with more restrictions meant to prevent misuse.
- OpenAI announced a plan to buy former Apple designer Jony Ive’s startup for $6.5 billion in a coupling that could jolt the race for AI-enabled hardware. There’s already been plenty of speculation about the assistant device OpenAI is purportedly building with Ive’s design prowess.
- After spotlighting consumer products at its 50th anniversary, Microsoft is once again locked in on all things enterprise and agents. The company let loose a barrage of 50 AI tool announcements meant to position Microsoft at the center of an emerging “agentic web” of autonomous systems interacting with one another. The releases spanned everything from a scientific discovery platform to a new Copilot 365 app.
- The announcement count continued apace as Google said it released 100 new tools at its own I/O conference. Most notable among these was a new AI Mode in search, a chat-search interface with multimodal and reasoning capabilities, and a Deep Search feature for more thorough research. (It wasn’t immediately well-received: A statement from the trade group News/Media Alliance called the AI Mode feature “the definition of theft” for displaying publisher content without links to sources.) Google’s realistic new video model, Veo 3, which now incorporates audio, also grabbed plenty of attention online. And capabilities developed through experimental agent Project Mariner will allow AI Mode searchers to do things like book tickets or shop, according to Google.
While OpenAI and Microsoft are sometimes portrayed as eating into Google’s core business, the search giant’s firehose of AI news may serve as a reminder that the AI race is still neck and neck.
Chirag Dekate, VP analyst at Gartner, said Google’s announcements around search were “incredibly disruptive and understated.” While Google’s announcements focused largely on consumer products, they could have big implications for businesses, Dekate said. The new agentic search experience might mean not just a rethink of SEO but also e-commerce strategies and how companies interact with businesses online more broadly.
“Google is aggressively redefining search from a list of links to an AI-powered, conversational, and agentic experience. This has profound implications for the enterprise,” Dekate told Tech Brew in an email. “Businesses must adapt to a world where search is increasingly about direct answers and task completion, not just information retrieval. This necessitates a shift in SEO strategies, content creation, and how businesses engage with customers online.”