Google starts September with fresh AI momentum after its longest losing streak

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Alphabet shares entered September coming off a four month losing streak, the longest since 2015, but the company opened the new month with several developments giving investors reason for optimism. Google launched Gemini 3.8 Flash on September 2nd, its third Flash model in six weeks, alongside a dedicated cybersecurity model called Gemini 3.8 Flash Cyber aimed at trusted government and enterprise customers, priced at 75 cents per million input tokens and designed to detect and patch software vulnerabilities at frontier level performance while running considerably faster and cheaper than larger models

Berkshire Hathaway CEO Greg Abel also offered a public vote of confidence in Alphabet's AI position, and a federal judge separately rejected the Justice Department's push to force Google to sell its ad exchange, another win against ongoing antitrust efforts targeting the company. Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian told CNBC that nearly three quarters of Google Cloud customers are already using its AI products, spending roughly 50 percent more than their initial commitments. Google DeepMind's Tulsee Doshi said the recent Flash models have positively surprised the company with their performance

Not everyone is fully convinced the momentum solves Google's deeper competitive position, though. D.A. Davidson analyst Gil Luria said the new model keeps Google in the race but probably doesn't change the fact that it remains a distant third to Anthropic and OpenAI in the enterprise market specifically. Curious what people think this pattern of smaller, faster, cheaper Flash model releases signals about Google's actual AI strategy compared to focusing primarily on the largest frontier models

Google starts September with AI momentum after longest monthly losing streak in over a decadewww.cnbc.com