The latest setback has fueled worries that Google was losing momentum just as OpenAI and Anthropic and a host of Chinese rivals have accelerated the pace of model releases. On the call on Wednesday, Pichai struck an unusually defensive tone as analysts pressed him on the state of Google's frontier models and whether they could still compete at the cutting edge of AI development.

Alphabet’s CEO Sundar Pichai’s admission in a New York Times podcast that Google is “falling a little behind” in AI coding tools has become one of the more pointed lines to emerge…

Google's delayed frontier model has rivals taking jabs. One analyst said it has shifted the perception "from leading edge to trailing edge."