Google Revamps AI Coding Strike Team to Include Midtraining as It Struggles to Catch Anthropic

My take: This one gave me a good laugh and honestly a little bit of pride. Google formed a coding 'strike team' back in April to close the gap with Anthropic, and it turns out the gap is wide enough that they already had to reorganize it. The new scope expands to include 'midtraining' (the phase between a model's broad initial training and its final instruction-tuning stages), because just improving the coding tools was not cutting it. Meanwhile, Google has lost six key researchers in five months: three went to Anthropic, one to OpenAI, one to Meta. Sergey Brin is now directly involved in the project. The company's own CFO admitted Anthropic writes close to 100% of its code with AI; Google is at 50%. It is like the team that announced it was going to win the championship, lost its best players to the rival, and is now running double practices in preseason 😅. I build my apps every day with Claude Code and the difference in tool quality is real and felt. Google knows it, and that is exactly why they are running.