With the artificial intelligence race moving so rapidly, even a momentary lag can be costly. Alphabet¡¯s Google is learning this the hard way: The search giant rapidly caught up with OpenAI and Anthropic last year when it released Gemini 3, an AI model that surpassed key rivals on many benchmarks.

Now, it¡¯s slipping behind on AI coding. The problem isn¡¯t Google¡¯s technology, but a confounding tangle of red tape.

The troubles are reflected in the big names who¡¯ve left Google¡¯s AI division in the last few months, including research icon Noam Shazeer, who helped invent the all-important transformer (the T in ChatGPT), and John Jumper, who won the Nobel Prize for his research into protein folding.