Google Could Release New 3.8 Flash AI Model As Soon As Wednesday, Says Report — GOOGL Stock Gains After-Hours

• The model could be released as soon as Wednesday, according to The Wall Street Journal.
• Google engineers reportedly preferred 3.8 Flash over Anthropic’s Opus in head-to-head testing through the company’s internal coding tool.
• The Flash series is designed to be smaller, cheaper and faster, but remains less powerful than Google’s largest AI models.

Alphabet Inc.’s (GOOGL) Google is reportedly preparing to release a new artificial-intelligence model focused on improving coding capabilities, an area where its Gemini models have trailed offerings from OpenAI and Anthropic. The model could arrive as soon as Wednesday, according to The Wall Street Journal.

GOOGL stock was up around 0.7% in after-hours trading at the time of writing after ending the regular session nearly 1.3% lower.

Google’s New AI Model

The model, called 3.8 Flash and internally referred to as “Skimaki,” is expected to be released as soon as Wednesday, according to the WSJ, which cited people familiar with the matter. In head-to-head testing conducted through Jetski, Google’s internal coding tool, the company’s engineers have reportedly preferred the new model over Anthropic’s Opus.

Since the start of the year, Google has been directing more research time and computing resources toward strengthening its models’ coding capabilities, according to the people. The company has particularly ramped up resources dedicated to reinforcement learning, a later stage of the training process in which models learn to perform tasks through trial and error.

Google Falls Behind Rivals

Google briefly emerged as a front-runner in the model-development race after releasing Gemini 3.0 in November 2025. However, the company has faced a series of setbacks this year, with Gemini once again trailing flagship models from Anthropic and OpenAI as agentic coding has become the premier business use case for AI, according to the WSJ.

Even a strong debut for Flash 3.8 would not necessarily put Google back at the forefront of AI model development, according to the report. The Flash series is built to be smaller, cheaper and faster to run, but is less powerful than Google’s largest models, which consist of trillions of numerical parameters.

GOOGL Stock: Stocktwits Retail Sentiment

On Stocktwits, retail sentiment for GOOGL was ‘bearish’ and unchanged over the past 24 hours, while message volume was ‘normal’ at the time of writing.

GOOGL stock has gained 7.6% year-to-date.

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