in DeepMind they use Claude, the rest of Google engineers want to and cannot

Things are hectic at Google. In recent months, some DeepMind engineers have had access to Claude Code and Anthropic models, but in many other parts of the company this tool, which is currently considered the best on the market, has been banned. This has caused strong internal tensions in the company, and is also a sign of something worrying: Google’s AI cannot compete with Anthropic’s at the moment.

what has happened. Steve Yegge is a software industry veteran who worked for years at Google. Last week posted a viral tweet in which he explained that after speaking with a current manager, he was concerned about the adoption of AI tools in this company. “The bottom line is that Google engineers have about the same adoption of AI as John Deere, the tractor company,” he said. Or what is the same: one of the most cutting-edge technology companies in the world was being anything but cutting-edge in its use of AI.

Demis Hassabis gets angry (and a lot). Recent Nobel laureate Demis Hassabis, head of DeepMind, criticized Yegge’s tweet and told him to stop spreading nonsense. “This publication is totally false and is simply clickbait,” he said.

Yegge returns to the fray. The engineer spoke in the following days with more current Google employees and discovered more things that he told in another long tweet. According to their conversations, the internal adoption of AI at Google follows a conventional pattern: 20% reject it, 60% use it in a basic way, and 20% take advantage of it intensively.

Either you let me use Claude Code or I’m out of here.. But there was something else: some engineers are prohibited from using Claude Code because it is a competing product, but the vast majority do not have access to those tools because the company wants them to use Google’s tools — that is, the Gemini models in Gemini CLI, its alternative to Claude Code. According to Yeggewhen they tried to force DeepMind engineers to stop using Claude Code and Anthropic models, they refused to stop using the tool and threatened to leave the company. Internal sources of the company confirmed the data published by Yegge in a published news on Business Insider.

Sergey Brin gets going. This week, The Information public that Sergey Brin has sent an internal memo to DeepMind engineers and researchers and confirms what was already being said. “To win the final sprint, we must urgently close the gap in agentic execution and turn our models into world-class developers,” the Google co-founder wrote. According to this data, an “assault team” has been created with the direct participation of Brin himself and DeepMind’s CTO, Koray Kavukcuoglu. That statement makes it clear that Gemini is below Claude in capabilities, because otherwise there would be no talk of “closing the gap.”

Google and fragmentation. It’s not just that Claude Opus and Claude Code are now better than Gemini and Gemini CLI. Es que además esto ha dejado claro que en empresas tan grandes como Google la fragmentación operativa puede llegar a ser un problema grave. That some can use something that others cannot, and that worse tools are forced just because they are their own, can end up generating internal tensions, as has happened. That is what Google now seems to want to remedy so that all its employees row together.

Another victory for Anthropic. All this controversy does nothing but favor Anthopic, which has managed to take the lead in this race – rather marathon – of AI. That the engineers at the prestigious DeepMind prefer their AI platform to Google’s own is an unequivocal sign that today Anthropic is ahead for AI experts.

Image | Alex Dudar

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