TL;DRGoogle launched Gemini 3.5 Flash at I/O 2026, calling it the company’s strongest model for coding and autonomous AI agents. The model is four times faster than rival frontier models, can run autonomously for hours, and was co-developed with Antigravity, Google’s new agent-first IDE. Flash is now the default model across the Gemini app, AI Mode in Search, and the new Gemini Spark personal agent.
Somewhere inside Google’s campus, an AI agent recently built an operating system from scratch. Not a toy demo, not a sanitised benchmark exercise, but a full OS assembled by software agents spawning off to handle separate components before stitching everything together. That, at least, is what Google showed the world at I/O 2026 on Monday, and it wants the demonstration to mark a turning point: the moment its AI stopped being a chatbot and started being a builder.
The model behind the feat is Gemini 3.5 Flash, which Google is calling its strongest model yet for coding and autonomous AI agents. According to Koray Kavukcuoglu, DeepMind’s chief technologist, Flash “outperforms our latest frontier model, 3.1 Pro, on nearly all benchmarks,” including coding, agentic tasks, and multimodal reasoning. The company says the model is four times faster than competing frontier models, and that an optimised version pushes that figure to 12 times faster with equivalent quality.
