Google Pitches Its AI Coding Tools as the Cost-Effective Option

Google came into its flagship developer conference, Google I/O, on Tuesday with a big question to answer: Does it have a counter to Anthropic’s dominance in coding?

The takeaway, after a sweltering day in Mountain View, Calif.: Google wants to redefine the competition. Google didn’t release a new “pro” version of its flagship model, Gemini, to compete with Anthropic’s much hyped (though not yet widely released) Mythos. It teased a Pro model coming later, but Google's emphasis instead was on a smaller new model, Gemini 3.5 Flash, and its coding agent Antigravity, a combination that the company is betting can become a workhorse option for developers looking to save money, especially amid compute constraints and soaring prices from Anthropic. 

“The top companies in Google Cloud are processing about 1 trillion tokens a day,” said CEO Sundar Pichai on stage. “If they shifted 80% of their workloads from other frontier models to 3.5 Flash, they would save over $1 billion annually.”