Google has delayed the general availability of its flagship Gemini 3.5 Pro model to July 2026, slipping past the June commitment that CEO Sundar Pichai made at Google I/O on May 19. Multiple outlets reported the delay, citing people familiar with the matter; Google has not issued an official statement.
Why the delay
Insider reports attribute the postponement to quality refinements in coding performance, token efficiency, and long-horizon task completion. The sibling release, Gemini 3.5 Flash, launched on schedule and is already available. The Pro variant — aimed at demanding enterprise and developer workloads — needs additional tuning before release. Prediction markets had already priced in the risk of a miss: odds of a June release stood at roughly 50–55% in the weeks before the deadline, according to Crypto Briefing.
Four senior researchers depart the same week
The slippage arrives alongside some of the most prominent talent departures in Google’s history. Noam Shazeer, a veteran researcher who helped build Google’s LaMDA large language model and later co-founded Character.AI — whose technology Google licensed for $2.7 billion in 2024 — announced on June 19 that he is joining OpenAI, less than two years after returning to the company.
John Jumper, a director at Google DeepMind, is headed to Anthropic. Jumper shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis for developing AlphaFold, an AI system that predicts protein structures and transformed drug discovery research. Two further senior contributors, Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel, also plan to join Anthropic, according to TechCrunch and Fortune.
Market reaction
Alphabet shares fell more than 5% following the announcements. Analysts cited both the personnel losses and the missed product milestone as signs of execution pressure in an intensifying AI race. Both OpenAI and Anthropic are preparing for public offerings, giving them unusual recruiting leverage through equity, observers noted.
The July window places Gemini 3.5 Pro in direct competition with frontier models from both rivals also targeting the same period.