Breaking

Google Restructures AI Coding Team to Counter Anthropic

June 28, 2026 at 11:00 EDT

AI Agents
Software Dev & Coding
Foundation Models

Google DeepMind has reorganized and formalized the AI coding "strike team" it formed in April 2026, expanding its focus to midtraining. The goal is reportedly to catch up with AI coding tools and agents such as Anthropic's Claude Code.

June 2026 · Google DeepMind

Google Reshuffles Its AI Coding "Strike Team" to Catch Anthropic

Set up in April 2026, the Code Strike Team is now expanding into "midtraining" and shifting toward a permanent model-training group — a bid to close the gap with Claude Code in the lucrative enterprise coding market.

Apr

2026 founding

Code Strike Team set up inside DeepMind

~2 mo

later, reorganized

Reported in late June

token context

Gemini's large-context strength

SWE-bench Verified — coding benchmark

Approximate share of tasks solved. Anthropic leads on pure coding.

~63.8%

Google
Gemini 3.1 Pro

~74–80%

Anthropic
Claude family

The training-stage shift

Pretraining

Broad initial training

→

Midtraining ◀ new focus

Reinforce with structured code & math data

→

Post-training

Instruction & task adaptation

Led by ex-pretraining lead Sebastian Borgeaud, with CTO Koray Kavukcuoglu and co-founder Sergey Brin involved — moving from post-training reliance toward more efficient capability gains.

Anthropic · Claude Code

Understands entire codebases
Multi-file edits, agentic execution
Working code from natural language

Open questions & risks

Price, availability, over-reliance concerns
DeepMind talent departures to rivals
Release timing & targets undisclosed

Continue reading

The rest of this article is for AI News Blitz readers. Choose an option below to keep reading.