The Leaked July 17 Came and Went, and the Model Didn't Show
We previously reported that multiple leaks had pinned Gemini 3.5 Pro's launch to July 17—that date has now passed, and the model didn't appear. Bloomberg, citing people familiar, reported the model was pushed back several months from its original plan, the sticking point being that its coding ability fell short of internal expectations: Google added a large amount of programming training data for fine-tuning in late June, but the test results were still unsatisfactory. The model was officially announced at Google I/O in May and was originally slated to launch in June, with no public version to date.
The Market Votes With Its Feet
CNBC reported that after the delay news broke, Alphabet's stock closed down about 4.4% on Thursday (July 16), erasing nearly $200 billion in market value in a single day, and fell over 2% again Friday. A Google spokesperson responded that the company is still iterating rapidly across multiple model lines, and that Gemini 3.5 Pro and an upgraded Flash are in testing with partners, but gave no new launch date; some reports say the company is internally weighing releasing a transitional Flash version as a stopgap, a claim that is unconfirmed.
Impact Assessment
The timing is quite unfavorable for Google: GPT-5.6's three tiers were just rolled out at volume, Moonshot's 2.8-trillion-parameter open source model Kimi K3 launched on July 16 and topped the frontend-coding leaderboard, and coding is precisely the subject where 3.5 Pro stumbled this time. Alphabet reports earnings next Wednesday (July 22), and needs to account to investors for the returns on $180–190 billion in full-year capital expenditure. For developers, the conclusion is the same as last time: keep making selection decisions based on currently available models, and don't leave a hole for a model that doesn't even have a date.
via: Bloomberg leak; CNBC (2026-07-16) reporting