Google ships Gemini 3.5 Flash and Spark agent — finally a credible answer to ChatGPT and Claude

Google used the May 19-20 I/O keynote to ship Gemini 3.5 Flash (half-to-one-third the price of frontier peers, now default in the Gemini app and AI Mode search globally) plus Gemini Spark — a general-purpose agent that reasons across connected apps and takes action on the user's behalf. Spark is in beta for Google AI Ultra subscribers and trusted testers starting next week.

This is the structural shift. Until today, Google had been visibly behind OpenAI (Operator, Codex App) and Anthropic (Claude Code, MCP) on the agent question. Gemini Spark closes that gap with one product launch — and the integration with Gmail, Calendar, Drive, and Search gives Google a distribution advantage neither rival can match.

The 3.5 Flash pricing is the under-noticed part. Cutting frontier-class capability to roughly $0.10 per million input tokens pushes the entire industry pricing curve down, and forces Anthropic and OpenAI to defend their premium tiers on capability ceiling rather than baseline quality. Expect a cascade of price cuts across the field over the next 30 days.

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