Google's flagship model is running behind, and the people who would normally fix that are walking out.
At I/O in May, Sundar Pichai stood on stage and told the crowd that Gemini 3.5 Pro was already being used internally, showing "great improvements," and would arrive next month. Next month came and went. According to Business Insider, the release has now slipped to July. A Google spokesperson declined to comment.
A few weeks of slippage on a model release isn't unusual on its own. What makes this one bite is what's happening around it.
Last month, John Jumper, the DeepMind researcher who won a Nobel Prize for AlphaFold, left for Anthropic. He isn't an outlier. Zachary Lipton, a Carnegie Mellon professor and Abridge cofounder who'd been working with DeepMind, also announced his departure. The LA Times has reported that Anthropic is specifically picking off senior Gemini people, not just hiring whoever happens to be on the market. Fortune put the question Google probably doesn't want to hear out loud: can the lab still stay at the frontier if this keeps up.
To be fair, Google is still shipping plenty of other things. Gemini 3.5 Flash, the cheaper sibling, came out on time and is performing well. Ben Kus, Box's CTO, said it beat the previous Flash version by 19.6% on Box's enterprise work tests. The Gemini app is past 900 million monthly users. AI Mode in search has crossed a billion. And Google is spending close to $190 billion in capex this year to make sure the runway stays clear.
But Pro is where the frontier race actually gets run. It's the model that has to go up against whatever Anthropic and OpenAI release next. It's what developers benchmark, what enterprises write contracts around, and what Pichai personally promised would be out by June. Missing that date is the kind of thing that gets explained away once. Twice starts to look like a pattern.
The departures matter here because AI labs don't work like normal companies. You can't just backfill a senior researcher and keep moving. The people leaving know which training decisions worked, which architectures failed, and why those calls were made in the first place. When the person who won a Nobel for a frontier AI breakthrough decides Anthropic is the better place to keep doing that work, money probably isn't the reason.
Some of Google's other moves are starting to read defensively too. Reuters reported over the weekend that Google has restricted Meta's access to its Gemini models. That's the kind of thing you do when you're trying to protect what you have rather than push outward.
Google still has scale nobody else can come close to, and one missed timeline doesn't erase billions of users or $190 billion in spending. But the next couple of months are going to test whether DeepMind is still the place where the most ambitious AI researchers on the planet want to spend their best years. If 3.5 Pro lands in July and it actually delivers on what Pichai promised in May, this whole thing becomes a footnote. If it slips again, or lands quietly, the question stops being whether Google can keep up with Anthropic and OpenAI. It becomes whether the people still inside DeepMind can pull off what the ones who already left used to do for them.
