Tech giant Google has allowed all of its engineers to use rival company Anthropic’s Opus 5 artificial intelligence model to write code, easing a strict internal rule that required developers to work exclusively with its own Gemini model.
Tech giant Google has allowed all of its engineers to use rival company Anthropic’s Opus 5 artificial intelligence model to write code, easing a strict internal rule that required developers to work exclusively with its own Gemini model.
This was reported by Business Insider, citing sources among employees and confirmation from a company representative.
Under the new order, developers have been given the opportunity to use Claude Opus 5 through Google’s internal development platform called Antigravity. Each employee has a special personal quota for using the third-party model.
“Engineers have access to select third-party models in Antigravity, consistent with our external enterprise offering. Gemini remains our primary and base model for internal development, with third-party tools available within quota to support specialized use cases,” a Google spokesperson said.
Previously, only select teams within Google’s DeepMind division and engineers on priority projects had access to Claude. This caused dissatisfaction among employees as management demanded increased productivity through AI, but Gemini was inferior to Anthropic and OpenAI tools on complex programming tasks, even with the release of Flash 3.8 updates.
Google is not the only tech giant to take a similar step under pressure from its employees. Previously, Amazon employees were also prohibited from using Claude Code to write product code or in live projects without official approval. Instead, they were required to use Kiro, the company’s own AI assistant for programming. However, Amazon later allowed employees to use Claude and OpenAI’s Codex tool.
