Googlers have some of the best perks in Silicon Valley, but there’s one thing many of them have long been denied: access to Anthropic’s Claude.
That just changed.
The company recently made one of Anthropic’s strongest coding models available to engineers across the company through its internal development tool, according to two employees and confirmed by a spokesperson.
It’s a notable change inside Google, which has typically barred most employees from using outside coding tools such as Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex, expecting them to build with Gemini instead.
There have been exceptions: teams within Google DeepMind have had access to Claude for some time, and some employees have secured it for high-priority engineering projects, according to three people with knowledge of the matter.
The move is an acknowledgment of how competitive the AI coding race has become.
Google has spent billions building Gemini and pushing employees to use its own AI tools, but when it comes to getting engineers to work faster, even Google is willing to turn to a rival.
Now, staff across the company are permitted to use Anthropic’s Opus 5 model for internal work — but only inside Antigravity, Google’s internal version of its development platform.
Google is a backer of Anthropic and announced plans earlier this year to invest up to $40 billion in the company.
“Engineers have access to select third-party models in Antigravity, which is aligned with our external Antigravity enterprise offering,” a Google spokesperson said. “Gemini remains our primary and foundational model for internal development, with third-party models available on a quota to support specialized use cases.”
The spokesperson said Claude was being offered with per-user quotas for employees and was designed to be supplementary to Gemini.
The change was a long time coming for some engineers. Despite recent gains from its Flash 3.8 model, Google is still trailing Anthropic and OpenAI on coding, leaving some Googlers frustrated with Gemini’s limitations.
That frustration was made worse by the fact that Claude access was previously limited to select teams, even as the company piled pressure on staff to show they were using AI to be more productive, Business Insider previously reported.
Google isn’t the only Big Tech company to give employees access to Claude after staff complaints. Amazon also started allowing employees to use the coding tool and Codex earlier this year.
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