Google brings agentic AI to Gemini

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1:56virtually, no excuses not to participate in this hands-on training. You won't want to miss out on the more than 300 sessions covering agentic AI for enterprise, personal AI and workflow automation, physical AI and robotics, gen AI, data engineering, and responsible AI. These are workshops and bootcamps taught by experts from companies like Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, and HuggingFace, just to name a few. Not only is this a great place to network with other data scientists, ML engineers, AI researchers, and technical leaders, I also think this is an awesome opportunity to focus on real-world applications and skills you can use at work.

2:32And I mean, you can learn about a wide range of topics. Again, ODSC West 2026 is happening October 27 through the 29th in San Francisco and virtually. Go to odsc.ai slash west and use promo code tcdaily for an additional 15 % off your pass to ODSC AI West 2026. That's odsc.ai slash west and use code TCDAILY to get an extra 15 % off on their number one AI builders and training conference. Google brings agentic AI to Gemini, starting with business. I'm Imran Shaikh and I'm here to get to business with your Friday Daily Crunch, featuring three big tech headlines starting right now. Anthropic updated its usage policy on Thursday, codifying new prohibitions on election interference, weapons software, and surveillance.

3:20But, you know, perhaps the most attention-getting change is a new prohibition against prolonged verbal abuse of the model, which is now expressly forbidden. Since an update in August, Claude has been trained to end conversations with persistently harmful or abusive user interactions, but the new policy explicitly bars users from pursuing those conversations. The policy update is meant to apply only in extreme cases where users repeatedly act cruelly toward our models, with no discernible purpose. The post explains, continuing, it does not apply to common versions of user frustration, pushback, dark creative themes, or model testing and research.

4:00Now the change comes after Anthropic has sought out collaborations with prominent religious scholars, in some cases seeking to convince them that Claude could be conscious or have a soul. Separate sections of the usage policy forbid users from engaging in broadly deceptive campaigns, such as using Claude to run fake accounts or fabricated news outlets. The policy also includes rules against deceiving voters or disrupting elections, collected in a section titled, Do Not Undermine Democratic Processes. Oof, OpenAI's revenue is reportedly$20 billion less than previously projected. You see, a little over a week ago, it was reported that OpenAI's annualized revenue was approaching$70 billion, dollars, a figure that would have made it competitive with Anthropik's reported run rate.

4:48Now, however, the AI lab is set to have told investors that the real revenue is some $20 billion lower than that. The Financial Times reports that the company has told investors that its annualized revenue is approaching$50 billion. The publication also notes that the previous figure of$70 billion was based on information that had previously been shared with investors by OpenAI. Well, that figure was devised via attempts by OpenAI's own investors to produce a direct comparison with Anthropik's annualized revenues per the Financial Times. It's worth pointing out here that OpenAI and Anthropik calculate their annualized revenue differently, with Anthropik counting sales made by its cloud partners.

5:30OpenAI, well, doesn't do this. Now, the issue of OpenAI's revenue has troubled the company as it attempts to justify the gargantuan investments being made on its behalf. I mean, the AI giant raised$122 billion during a March funding round alone. The company's leaked 2025 financials earlier this year showed it had made about$13 billion, but spent significantly more. OpenAI's IPO, which was previously rumored to be materializing this year, has been pushed off until early 2027. At a Google Cloud event on Thursday, the company announced it's bringing its Gemini AI into the agentic age with the launch of a unified agent that can not only answer questions, but also get things done on the user's behalf, all from a single interface.

6:20Now, the move comes as AI tools have been moving beyond being just conversational experiences to those that can take ownership of assigned tasks, generate code, schedule meetings, book appointments and travel, and a whole bunch more. It also follows the rise of consumer-facing agents like Meta's Muse and those that operate over messaging like Instinct and others, as well as the recent debut of ChatGPT's Dots. The company still has a good shot at achieving scale for its agentic efforts. As Google CEO Sundar Pichai pointed out at the event's start, Gemini today has over 1 billion monthly active users.

6:55He also noted that nearly 90 % of Fortune 100 businesses now use Gemini Enterprise at work. Given Gemini's adoption in the corporate world, Google will initially focus on bringing the agent to businesses before later rolling it out to consumers. According to Pichai, this will allow the company to solve the harder problems around security, scale, and performance, which come with launching powerful agents such as these. Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, explained that the new agent can be given objectives, not just instructions. Well, that means it's able to plan the work, use custom skills and tools, and connect to businesses' internal systems to accomplish its goals.

7:36By default, the AI will pick the best model to complete the task, but users can also take over to choose a model, including those from third parties, starting with Anthropics Claude models. Google said that it'll expand the model picker to include open-source models and other private models in the future. Now to the latest in startup business news, all in about one minute. Imran, thank you, and let's begin with Arena. Arena, which originated in 2023, has a research project at US Berkeley that crowdsourced rankings of AI models, has raised a$200 million Series B round at a$3.1 billion valuation.

8:14This comes after the company said it reached$100 million in annualized run rate revenue in June. Arena provides a crowdsourced platform that is free for consumers to use. People enter prompts or request vibe-coded projects and then rate which model does it better. Arena claims it has tens of millions of monthly visitors. Investa, an AI-native software startup that helps lenders originate mortgages, announced on Thursday that it raised a$30 million round led by conversion capital. The startup uses AI agents to automate much of the loan origination process, which the founders say helps lenders reduce the time and costs of processing mortgages.

8:58Three of the company's customers, including PennyMac and New American Funding, also invested in the round alongside City Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz. With Vesta, the idea is to allow humans to deploy a swarm of agents to speed completion of tasks. And folks, that's your Daily Crunch. Today's stories were reported by Russell Brandom, Lucas Ropec, Sarah Perez, and more awesome TechCrunch journalists. We'll see you here tomorrow, same Tech Time, same Crunch channel. Until then, find us at TechCrunch.com.

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