Google is shipping Gemini models faster than its AI safety reports

Summary

More than two years after Google was caught flat-footed by the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the company has dramatically picked up the pace. In late March, Google launched an AI reasoning model, Gemini 2.5 Pro, that leads the industry on several benchmarks measuring coding and math capabilities. That launch came just three months after the tech giant debuted another model, Gemini 2.0 Flash, that was state-of-the-art for the time. Google’s Director and Head of Product for Gemini, Tulsee Doshi, told TechCrunch in an interview that the increasing cadence of the company’s model launches is part of a concerted effort to keep up with the rapidly evolving AI industry. “We’re still trying to figure out what the right way to put these models out is — what the right way is to get feedback,” said Doshi. But the ramped-up release time frame appears to have come at a cost. Google has yet to publish safety reports for its latest models, including Gemini 2.5 Pro and Gemini 2.0 Flash, raising concerns that the company is prioritizing speed over transparency. Today, it’s fairly standard for frontier AI labs — including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta — to report safety testing, performance evaluations, and use cases whenever they launch a new model. These reports, sometimes called system cards or model cards, were proposed years ago by researchers in industry and academia. Google was actually one of the first to suggest model cards in a 2019 research paper, calling them “an approach for responsible, transparent, and accountable practices in machine learning.” Doshi told TechCrunch that the company hasn’t published a model card for Gemini 2.5 Pro because it considers the model to be an “experimental” release. The goal of these experimental releases is to put an AI model out in a limited way, get feedback, and iterate on the model ahead of a production launch, she said. Google intends to publish Gemini 2.5 Pro’s model card when it makes the model generally available, according to Doshi, a...