Google CEO Sundar Pichai on the one AI race Google is ‘losing’ to Anthropic and OpenAI

Google CEO Sundar Pichai has conceded that his company is trailing rivals in agentic coding, the one AI capability that has turned into the industry's most lucrative battleground. Speaking on the Hard Fork podcast, published by The New York Times, Pichai said Google's models sit at the frontier on text, multimodality, voice and reasoning, but not on the long-horizon coding tasks that Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex have made their calling card. "When it comes to agentic coding with tool use, instruction following and long-horizon tasks, I think we are a bit behind at this moment," he said.His explanation was blunt, and it was about product, not model quality. Google never had the place where developers actually work, so it never got the data flowing back.