Google has rolled out Gemini Spark, a general-purpose AI agent built into the Gemini app that reasons over information across a user's connected apps to carry out multi-step tasks. It arrived as part of a broader May 2026 update aimed at keeping pace with OpenAI and Anthropic.
The same update introduced Gemini 3.5 Flash, a lighter-weight model Google positions as offering frontier-class capability at roughly half — and in some cases close to a third — of the price of comparable models, extending Google's cost-per-token advantage.
Executives across Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic increasingly describe the frontier race as effectively neck-and-neck, each making different tradeoffs around cost, speed, and compute. Spark is Google's bet that distribution through the Gemini app, grounded in a user's own apps and data, is where the next round of competition is decided.