Google Prepares to Release New 3.8 Flash AI Model Amid AI Development Race

Google is reportedly preparing to release its new AI model, 3.8 Flash, as soon as Wednesday, according to The Wall Street Journal. This comes after the company's engineers preferred the new model over Anthropic's Opus in head-to-head testing through Google's internal coding tool, Jetski.

The 3.8 Flash model is part of the Flash series, designed to be smaller, cheaper, and faster than Google's largest AI models, but less powerful. The company has been directing more research time and computing resources toward strengthening its models' coding capabilities, particularly in reinforcement learning.

Google briefly emerged as a front-runner in the model-development race after releasing Gemini 3.0 in November 2025, but has since faced setbacks with Gemini trailing flagship models from Anthropic and OpenAI. Even a strong debut for Flash 3.8 would not necessarily put Google back at the forefront of AI model development.

GOOGL stock was up around 0.7% in after-hours trading at the time of writing, following a nearly 1.3% decline during the regular session.