Google co-founder Sergey Brin has been personally urging AI staff to accelerate work on the company's Gemini model, as Alphabet seeks to close a widening gap with rivals Anthropic and OpenAI, two people familiar with his remarks told Reuters. In an April town hall, Brin addressed hundreds of employees at the company's Google DeepMind AI lab, telling them to move faster after Anthropic previewed its powerful Claude Mythos model. The urgency reflects a pattern: Google's Gemini model briefly overtook competitors last November, but new updates from Anthropic and OpenAI once again put it in catch-up mode.
By August, Google delayed the new flagship version of Gemini by two months after internal testing showed its performance continued to lag behind rivals in areas such as coding, sources said. On Aug 5, the tech giant announced a sweeping leadership overhaul: Demis Hassabis stepped aside as head of the Google DeepMind division, replaced by his deputy Koray Kavukcuoglu. Hassabis became chair with fewer management obligations, while the two original technical co-leads of Gemini quit to co-found a startup.
Interviews with seven people knowledgeable about Gemini's development show the reorganization is tied directly to Alphabet's effort to achieve model supremacy. The changes mark a further erosion of DeepMind's autonomy, which Google has chipped away at since buying the London-based lab in 2014. Alphabet's shake-up included a revelation during an all-hands meeting on Aug. 6 that some teams were moving out of DeepMind and into corporate Google, two sources said.
The leadership shake-up
Under Hassabis, Google DeepMind pursued a wider range of AI research projects than its rivals, but he worked against some efforts that could have meant new revenue for Alphabet or helped it gain better footing in the AI race, a Reuters special report in 2025 showed. In response, Google CEO Sundar Pichai appointed Kavukcuoglu as chief AI architect in 2025, tasked with embedding Gemini across the company's products. Four sources told Reuters that in the months that followed, some leaders at DeepMind found their influence diminished while Kavukcuoglu became the central figure shaping Gemini's direction.
News of the shake-up caused Google's stock to drop 4 percent on the day of the announcement. At a unit-wide all-hands meeting on Aug. 6, Hassabis and Kavukcuoglu sought to assuage staff concerns about the AI lab's future.
"The Google leaders said day-to-day work at the lab would remain the same," according to three sources with direct knowledge of the meeting. Kavukcuoglu would stay in charge of Gemini. Hassabis gave a talk about how AI could advance science and alter society, long-term issues that would constitute the focus of his new role as chair.
Senior leaders in the cloud division expect Kavukcuoglu's appointment to alleviate tensions with DeepMind over allocation of Google's constrained supply of AI chips, known as Tensor Processing Units.
Brin pushes recursive self-improvement
The shake-up comes as Brin has worked to fire up staff, something he also did after OpenAI's ChatGPT launch in 2022 jolted Google. Although he no longer holds an executive title, the 52-year-old Brin has been informally influencing model training efforts. For several months now, he has been remarking to key staff that they need to catch up to the frontier, according to one source. Brin has used his implicit power to push resource allocation toward specific areas, such as recursive self-improvement, the point at which the technology can improve without human intervention.
Though Google caught up to the frontier in November 2025 with the release of Gemini 3, it quickly fell behind again. Four sources characterized its laggard status as a result of lingering structural challenges: constraints in computing capacity and disagreements between Gemini's many project leaders led to fewer resources for areas that would prove critical, such as coding. Google's bureaucratic nature also caused it to release models at a slower pace than nimbler rivals.
Power shifts to California
Kavukcuoglu has been consolidating power. He moved from London to Mountain View in 2025 for the chief AI architect promotion, reporting directly to Pichai. Some London-based leaders found their influence on Gemini's technical direction had diminished in the wake of Hassabis's decreasing involvement and Kavukcuoglu's relocation to Google's headquarters, according to a source with direct knowledge.
Even before his relocation, Kavukcuoglu was the primary point of contact between DeepMind and Google Cloud, the company's main AI revenue engine. He now will have final say on major decisions for DeepMind. Some of the highest-profile leaders other than Kavukcuoglu, including Gemini's original technical co-leads, left as part of the shake-up, making some staff anxious that the lab's bulwark against commercial interests would further erode.
For executives navigating AI strategy, the structural shifts inside Google offer a clear lesson: the era of pure research labs operating independently is ending. Companies will increasingly prioritize commercial deployment and model performance. For external partners, these changes may also affect plans for Google Cloud pricing and how Gemini is integrated into enterprise software.
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