Google is starting September with more momentum after a rough summer for its stock. The company ended August with a four-month losing streak, its longest stretch on Wall Street since 2015.
This week brought a mix of good news for the tech giant. Google launched a new AI model, and a federal judge sided with the company in an antitrust case.
The stock has not fully bounced back yet. Shares rose 0.6% on Wednesday after falling more than 1% on Tuesday.
New AI Model Targets Coding And Agent Tasks
Google released Gemini 3.8 Flash on Wednesday. It is the third Flash model the company has put out in six weeks.
The company says this version is its best model yet for reasoning and coding tasks. It also handles multi-step tasks better than the previous Flash model.
Pricing stays the same as before. It costs 75 cents per million input tokens and $3.75 per million output tokens.
Google also updated pricing for Gemini Enterprise. Changes include pay-as-you-go options and token discounts of up to 20%.
Tulsee Doshi, a senior director at Google DeepMind, said the recent Flash models have performed better than expected. She said the results give the team more reason to keep building on them.
Not everyone is convinced this closes the gap with rivals. Analyst Gil Luria said the model keeps Google in the race, but the company remains in third place in the enterprise market.
Google also released a cybersecurity tool called Gemini 3.8 Flash Cyber. It is built to find and fix software weaknesses quickly and at a lower cost than larger AI models.
Access to the cyber tool is limited for now. Google is rolling it out through a program called Fairwind to a small group of trusted government and enterprise users first.
Antitrust Ruling And Ad Business Growth
A federal judge ruled this week that Google does not have to sell AdX, its ad exchange. The judge chose behavior-based rules instead of breaking up the company, which is what the Justice Department wanted.
This follows an earlier ruling in a separate case. That ruling also rejected a plan to force Google to sell Chrome.
Attorney Wyatt Fore said the ruling matters. He said Google can now compete in AI without a breakup hanging over it.
Google's ad business kept growing during this stretch. It grew 14% in the latest quarter.
Google Cloud is also expanding. About three-quarters of its customers already use its AI products.
Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said those customers are spending about 50% more than their original agreements. Berkshire Hathaway CEO Greg Abel told CNBC that Alphabet is a winner in AI, based on how Berkshire's own companies use the technology.
DeepMind's Demis Hassabis also spoke publicly this week. It was his first public appearance since DeepMind's internal reorganization last month, when he moved from CEO to chairman of the unit.
Hassabis said Gemini could work as a layer that connects smaller, specialized AI models and agents. He shared that view during a talk at the G20 Innovation meeting on Wednesday.
