Google has delayed the general release of Gemini 3.5 Pro to July 2026, according to Business Insider, citing a person familiar with the matter. A Google spokesperson declined to comment. The model had been due in June — a timeline CEO Sundar Pichai set personally at the company’s I/O developer conference on May 19.
Asked at I/O about general availability, Pichai told the audience to “give us until next month,” drawing an audible groan from developers who have watched multiple Google AI commitments slip past their announced windows.
What Gemini 3.5 Pro is expected to offer
The model is Google’s flagship for the current generation. It features a 2-million-token context window — double that of Claude Opus 4.8 — and a Deep Think stepped-reasoning mode designed to compete with OpenAI’s extended thinking. It handles mixed text and image inputs and is planned for distribution through Google AI Studio, Vertex AI, and direct API access. Estimated pricing is around $15 per million input tokens and $60 per million output tokens.
A lighter sibling, Gemini 3.5 Flash, is already publicly available. Pro has so far been accessible only to a limited group of Vertex AI enterprise customers.
Context: a difficult month for Google’s AI lab
The delay arrives as Google DeepMind has faced a wave of senior researcher departures throughout June, with several key figures moving to OpenAI and Anthropic. Alphabet shares fell roughly 5–6% as the departures compounded pressure on the company’s AI ambitions.
Google has not announced a specific date beyond “July.” The company’s Cloud Next event, expected later this summer, is likely to serve as the next opportunity for a public timeline update.