Can Google Catch Up? Sergey Brin Leads a New AI Coding ‘Strike Team’

Google has created a "Strike Team" of researchers and engineers, led by DeepMind engineer Sebastian Borgeaud (who previously oversaw Gemini pre‑training), to improve its AI programming models and ultimately automate more internal coding work, even pursuing AI self‑optimization.

Sergey Brin and DeepMind CTO Koray Kavukcuoglu are directly involved; in a recent memo Brin demanded an aggressive shift to close the gap in Agent execution capability and make the model the core of code development.

The initiative is a response to Anthropic’s release of Claude Opus 4.7, which raised coding benchmark scores by 13% and tripled the autonomous completion rate of production‑level tasks. DeepMind researchers say Anthropic’s tool now surpasses Google’s Gemini model in code‑writing ability.

Google CFO announced that roughly 50% of the company’s code is already written by Coding Agents before engineers review it, while Anthropic claims 100% of its code is generated by Claude Code/Opus, highlighting a stark contrast that has spurred urgency.

The strike team will focus on improving model performance on long‑context coding tasks—such as generating complete software from scratch—that require understanding multi‑file structures and user intent. It will train the models on Google DeepMind’s private code repository, whose data differ greatly from public sources and are critical for performance, though the resulting models will not be released directly.

Observers note that despite Google’s massive internal codebase (>2 B LOC), it lags behind Anthropic and OpenAI in combined coding‑plus‑Agent capabilities, partly because engineers are confined to internal tools like Gemini CLI and Antigravity.

Brin’s return to a "founder mode" mirrors his earlier comeback that merged Google Brain with DeepMind and propelled the Gemini series to the industry forefront; analysts now wonder whether this new strike team can replicate that success against Anthropic’s pressure.

Reference links: https://x.com/ns123abc/status/2046241790110445930, https://x.com/Yuchenj_UW/status/2046246166871089438, https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-creates-strike-team-improve-coding-models