Google

Google's stated advantage is silicon: three to four generations of lead in TPU chips, backed by 100 billion dollars in cash. Kent Beck, writing in April 2026 about the usage limits imposed almost simultaneously by Google, Amazon and Anthropic, singles Google out as the one provider not competing for scarce Nvidia H100 allocations, because it fabricates its own chips.

What recurs more often than the hardware is Google in the role of convention publisher. On 6 August 2026 it joined the Agent Plugins 1.0.0 specification as a Core Maintainer, represented by Kevin Hou of Google DeepMind, alongside Amazon, Cursor, Microsoft, OpenAI and Vercel; Anthropic, which authored both of the components the format packages, is absent from that maintainer list. The same posture shows up in «design.md», in «Universal Commerce Protocol» (announced January 2026, used by Wayfair and Etsy for agent-driven purchases from 11 February 2026), in the May 2026 whitepaper «The New SDLC With Vibe Coding» by «Addy Osmani», Shubham Saboo and Sokratis Kartakis, and in Beyond Zero, published in ACM Queue on 20 July 2026 by «Joseph Valente» and «Michal Zalewski» as an explicit successor to the 2014 BeyondCorp paper.

That publishing habit sits next to a second one. Matthew Connelly's February 2026 New York Times piece records Google giving students a full year of premium access and inviting them to upload lecture recordings to «NotebookLM», something Columbia forbids without authorization. Mathieu Grymonprez of Adeo credits Google with a production awareness OpenAI and Anthropic lack, then names lock-in of enterprise intelligence as his largest fear.