Microsoft and Google are late to AI coding, but 'absolutely critical' they compete for growth

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella speaks on stage during the Microsoft AI Tour in Munich, Germany, on Feb. 25, 2026. Sven Hoppe | Picture Alliance | Getty Images In the booming generative AI market, Anthropic has zoomed ahead of the field, largely thanks to Claude Code, its AI coding assistant. Seeing where the money is, OpenAI shifted much of its focus from the consumer market to enterprise, where its Codex offering is going up against Claude Code. Now, Google and Microsoft are making a concerted effort to get into the game, using their massive balance sheets and expansive cloud businesses to try and lure developers. At its developer conference last month, Google placed heavy emphasis on agentic AI, including the unveiling of Antigravity 2.0, which the company said can "orchestrate multiple agents to execute tasks in parallel, such as having one agent code a website while another generates brand assets." And at the beginning of a blog post announcing Gemini 3.5 Flash, Google said the new model offers "frontier performance for agents and coding." Microsoft's turn on stage comes this week at its annual Build conference in San Francisco. There the company intends to announce a coding model that will be available in Copilot, emphasizing its lower price relative to alternatives, said a person familiar with the plans who asked not to be named in order to discuss internal matters. The Information reported on the plans last week. Microsoft declined to comment. …