Google delays Gemini 3.5 Pro to July as senior researchers defect to Anthropic and OpenAI

Google has pushed back the release of its next frontier model, Gemini 3.5 Pro, from June to July, attributing the slip to extra time gathering feedback from early testers and refining the model. Gemini 3.5 Pro is expected to excel at long-horizon tasks and power agents, with Google aiming to sharpen its coding capabilities to compete more effectively against Anthropic and OpenAI.

The delay lands amid an awkward talent story. Senior Gemini researchers Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel — collaborators of Nobel laureate John Jumper's protein-folding work — are set to join Anthropic, and Transformer co-author Noam Shazeer reportedly left DeepMind for OpenAI. Combined, the departures have fueled a 'Google losing the arms race' narrative, even as DeepMind remains a research powerhouse.

Competitively, the timing is poor: Anthropic's Fable 5 is benchmarking above Gemini 3.1 Pro, OpenAI is shipping GPT-5.6, and Chinese open models are closing long-horizon coding gaps to within 1–4%. A delayed frontier release plus visible attrition compounds the perception problem, regardless of the eventual model's quality.

The community piled on. A satirical r/singularity post — 'Gemini 3.5 pro so ass the US government intervened' — hit 1,875 upvotes, mocking quality concerns by riffing on the Mythos/GPT-5.6 government-gating saga. A widely shared writeup framed the slip-plus-defections as a roadmap-confidence crisis. Skeptics counter that a one-month delay for tester feedback is routine and that talent churn at this scale is normal in a hot market. What to watch: whether the July GA actually ships, and how Gemini 3.5 Pro's coding benchmarks stack up against Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 when it does.