Google DeepMind's new chief, Koray Kavukcuoglu, put Gemini 4 on a public timetable at The Information's AI Agenda Live Summit on September 23. He said the next flagship has entered early post-training — the feedback, reinforcement-learning and safety-tuning phase after the base-model run — and that Google wants to release an early post-training version 'as soon as possible.'

Coverage of the remarks, led by 9to5Google, says he hopes an early version lands 'much earlier' than the end of 2026. Engineers are already testing the model internally in Antigravity, Google's agentic coding platform — a practical test of whether Gemini 4 can power agents people trust to do real work, not just post benchmark scores.

This is schedule signaling, not a launch: no ship date, and safety testing is still underway. But it is Google's first public word on Gemini 4's state since Kavukcuoglu took over from Demis Hassabis in August — and a direct answer to critics who say Google has fallen behind OpenAI and Anthropic.

UPDATE 2026-10-01: confirmed — Google announced Gemini 4 Argon on September 30, landing the "much earlier than the end of the year" timing Kavukcuoglu promised. See the Gemini 4 Argon announcement entry.