Google begins putting the guardrails on agentic AI

The most important thing Google announced at Google Cloud Next 2026 wasn’t another model, another Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), or another way to sprinkle Gemini across the enterprise (though it did all these things). Rather, it was an admission, or possibly a warning. Agents need supervision. We already knew this, of course, but “to know and not yet to do is not yet to know” as my high school philosophy teacher used to say. We like to think of agents as digital employees frenetically doin...