Scaling real-time AI agents with session-aware load balancing

Real-time AI agents break traditional request-response load balancing paradigms because they rely on long-lived, stateful bidirectional streams that obscure true server capacity. To solve this, developers must implement application-level session tracking directly within the runtime to accurately measure the committed concurrent workload of active conversations. By feeding these precise session counts alongside standard CPU utilization metrics into a hybrid routing algorithm, infrastructure can effectively distribute stateful AI traffic and prevent individual backend bottlenecks.

Google Ads API pilot: Secure API Access to your Manager Accounts

The Google Ads API is piloting a security feature designed for securing API access to Google Ads manager accounts. We are seeking developers who would like to participate in this pilot project and provide us with feedback.

What are we offering?

The new pilot program protects accounts under a Google Ads manager hierarchy by restricting access to sensitive API methods such as account management, user management, and billing API calls to a pre-approved allowlist of Google Cloud projects. This happens in the following phases:

  1. You sign up for the pilot program, and share the customer ID of your top-level Google Ads manager account.
  2. Google performs an audit of the API activity of all the accounts under the Google Ads manager account to identify the list of applications and their Google Cloud project numbers.
  3. Google works with you to establish an allowlist of approved applications and projects as a new mechanism for controlling API access to sensitive methods.

After the Google Ads manager account is secured, any unapproved application that tries to make sensitive API calls to any account under the protected manager account will fail.

This security measure provides benefits:

  • Enhanced Security: Lowers the risk of account takeovers by malicious applications by helping to restrict access so that only verified tools can perform sensitive operations, even if your credentials are compromised.
  • Improved Visibility: Provides advertisers with a clear and concise view of exactly which applications have access to their advertising data and are performing sensitive actions on their accounts.

How do I join this program?

To participate in this program, express your interest by filling out the application form. You should provide your contact email address and the customer ID of the top-level Google Ads manager account that you want to secure. If Google selects your account for participation in the pilot program, then we will reach out to you using the email address you provided, and list the next steps required to secure the accounts under your Google Ads manager account under this pilot program.

How do I authorize new applications under this program?

If you are participating in this program and want to allowlist a new application to make sensitive API calls to the accounts under the protected Google Ads manager account, let us know the Google Cloud project number of the application by filling out the form. If you don’t have these details, you can reach out to your application developer for this information. Google will make the necessary changes within 10 business days and let you know.

How do I stop participating in this program?

If you are participating in this program and want to stop your participation, contact Google Ads API support using the same email address you used when signing up for this program and let us know the reason why you are opting out of this program. Google will make the necessary changes within 10 business days and let you know.

What happens if I unlink an account from a protected top-level manager account?

If you unlink an account from the hierarchy under a protected top-level manager account the account loses the API protection offered under this program.

What happens if I link a new account under a protected top-level manager account?

If you link an account under the hierarchy of a protected top-level manager account, the newly linked account will inherit the protection from the top-level manager account. In addition, if a newly linked account has existing applications, but those applications are not already authorized by the manager account, they might fail and may need to be authorized.

If you have more questions about this pilot program, you can contact support.

 - , Google Ads API Team

Chrome Beta for Desktop Update

The Beta channel has been updated to 152.0.7977.13 for Windows, Mac and Linux.

A partial list of changes is available in the Git log. Interested in switching release channels? Find out how. If you find a new issue, please let us know by filing a bug. The community help forum is also a great place to reach out for help or learn about common issues.

Chrome Release Team
Google Chrome

Adapting open source practices to an AI-first world: A retrospective on 2025

by Sophia Vargas, Google Open Source

Even as AI adoption accelerates and transforms the global technology landscape, open source remains foundational to how Alphabet builds, uses, and collaborates on products for billions of users. Our commitment to open source remains broad and consistent, including sharing our work year-over-year, and reflecting on what we've learned.

In 2025:

  • Roughly 10% of Alphabet's full-time workforce actively contributed to open source projects. This contribution ratio has remained steady over the past five years, scaling to match our growth.
  • These open source contributions are not just solely focused on Google. Our top projects by unique contributors at Alphabet include community-led projects such as LLVM, vLLM, Envoy, and Rust, as well as Google-initiated projects like Kubernetes, Apache Beam, and gRPC.
  • In addition, Alphabet projects received commits from more than 20,000 non-Alphabet affiliated user accounts.

Working together on emerging standards

Open source communities continue to provide vital collaborative spaces to define emerging standards, ensuring the interoperability and extensibility for the next generation of technologies. In 2025, we worked with more than 50 partners on the Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol to enable AI agents to communicate with each other, securely exchange information, and coordinate actions on top of various enterprise platforms and applications. Within weeks of our initial announcement, Google donated the A2A project to the Linux Foundation as part of our long-standing commitment to develop "open, collaborative ecosystem – offering greater autonomy and multiplying productivity."

Google Cloud - Partners contributing to the Agent 2 Agent protocol - Accenture, Arize, Articul, ask-ai, Atlassian, BCG, Box, c3.ai, Capgemini, Chronosphere, Cognizant, Cohere, Colibra, Contextual.ai, Cotality, Datadog, and more

Launching tools with transparency

Open source licenses provide a framework for anyone to explore, test, fork and expand on our technologies. Over the last 15 years, Google has created more than 15,000 public repositories on GitHub. Today, Google continues to maintain more than 5,000 public repositories on GitHub, and more than 1,500 public repositories on Git-on-Borg. A quick look back to some highlights from our 2025 launches includes:

  • Gemma 3 – a collection of lightweight open models built from the same research and technology that powers our Gemini 2.0 models. They are designed to run directly on devices — from phones and laptops to workstations — helping developers create AI applications, wherever people need them. Since Gemma’s release in 2024, the Gemmaverse community has created more than 60,000 Gemma variants. We’ve continued work on this collection and in 2026 we released Gemma 4 under an Apache 2.0 license.
  • Agent Development Kit – an open-source framework and SDK designed to help developers build, compose, and run both conversational and non-conversational AI agents.

Adjusting our collective security practices

As the threat landscape evolves and accelerates in the AI era, we are working on novel solutions to mitigate vulnerabilities at scale and remove some of the burden from overloaded maintainers. In 2025, we introduced several critical security initiatives to support upstream open source projects:

  • CodeMender: An agent designed to be both reactive, instantly patching new vulnerabilities, and proactive, rewriting and securing existing code and eliminating entire classes of vulnerabilities in the process. In its first six months, we were able to upstream 72 security fixes to open source projects, including some as large as 4.5 million lines of code.
  • OSS Rebuild: A security initiative to prevent software supply chain attacks by verifying build provenance. It automates package rebuilding and semantically compares results to upstream artifacts to detect tampered code on registries like PyPI, npm, and Crates.io.
  • OSV-Scalibr: (Software Composition Analysis Library) the core engine for vulnerability scanning used internally and in OSV-Scanner.
  • Credential Scanning on deps.dev: A service (using Veles) that actively scans open-source packages on deps.dev for leaked GCP credentials to prevent account compromise.

Working together to sustain the contributor community

Beyond security contributions, we remain committed to providing financial support directly to projects and maintainers. In 2025, the Open Source Programs Office (OSPO) directed $2M in sponsorships and investments to more than 40 open source projects.

Google Summer of Code celebrated its 21st year of enabling open source organizations to find, mentor, and onboard new contributors, directly supporting 1,280 individuals to contribute to 185 organizations. Over its lifetime, the global program has connected more than 23,000 participants from 125 countries with over 1,000 open source organizations globally. Moving forward, we recognize the need to evolve our program structures to ensure they continue to effectively support maintainers in the AI era.

Evolving the way we work in open spaces

Respecting community norms and practices is fundamental to establishing and maintaining trust in open source communities. To ensure we remain supportive members of your community, we encourage projects to document preferred practices and policies in the wake of new technologies. As AI changes the way we work, we are continually evaluating how best to evolve the way we engage in open spaces to preserve, prepare and bolster the communities we depend on.

We are deeply grateful for the many individuals and organizations that have worked with us to create global technologies from which everyone can benefit. You can continue to learn more about our open source initiatives, ongoing programs, and new projects at opensource.google.

Appendix: About this data

This report features metrics provided by many teams and programs across Alphabet. In regards to the code and code-adjacent activities data, we wanted to share more details about the derivation of those metrics.

  • Data sources: These data represent the activities of Alphabet employees on public repositories hosted on GitHub and our internal production Git service Git-on-Borg. These sources represent a subset of open source activity currently tracked by Google OSPO.
  • Business and personal: Activity on GitHub reflects a mixture of Alphabet projects, third-party projects, experimental efforts, and personal projects. Our metrics report on all of the above unless otherwise specified.
  • Alphabet contributors: Please note that unless additional detail is specified, activity counts attributed to Alphabet open source contributors will include our full-time employees as well as our extended Alphabet community (temps, vendors, contractors, and interns). In 2025, full time employees at Alphabet represented more than 95% of our open source contributors.
  • GitHub Accounts: For counts of GitHub accounts not affiliated with Alphabet, we cannot assume that one account is equivalent to one person, as multiple accounts could be tied to one individual or bot account.
  • Active counts: Where possible, we will show ‘active users’ defined by logged activity (excluding ‘WatchEvent’) within a specified timeframe (a month, year, etc.) and ‘active repositories’ and ‘active projects’ as those that have enough activity to meet our internal active-project criteria and have not been archived.

Visual screenshots now included in Google Meet meeting notes

We’re improving the ‘Take notes for me’ feature in Google Meet by giving you the ability to automatically capture and include screenshots of presented content directly in the meeting notes document.

While meeting transcripts capture what is said, they often miss critical visual context, like content that was presented. Without these visuals, notes can lack necessary detail or even be confusing if a speaker refers to a chart or diagram without describing it out loud.


Getting started

  • Admins: You can configure this feature in the Admin console to either always allow screenshots of presented content or only allow them when a recording is enabled. Visit the Help Center to learn more.
  • End users: When you begin presenting in a meeting where notes are being taken, you will see a notification alerting you that Gemini may capture screenshots of your presentation to add to the notes. This feature can be disabled from the notes panel.

Rollout pace

Availability

  • Business: Business Standard and Plus
  • Enterprise: Enterprise Standard and Plus
  • Education: Google AI Pro for Education

Resources

Provide more clear, contextual feedback with timestamped comments in Google Drive videos

We are introducing timestamped comments for videos in Google Drive on the web. Users can now anchor comments to a specific time mark in a video, making video collaboration more direct, precise, and contextual.

When reviewing a video file, users can choose between adding a timestamped comment or a general file-level comment using a split button in the commenting interface.  Each timestamped comment generates a visual marker directly on the video player timeline. Clicking a marker automatically jumps to that point in the video and highlights the associated comment, allowing reviewers and video owners to navigate feedback without manually scrubbing through media files. Standard commenting capabilities—such as editing, resolving, replying, and mentioning colleagues with @ notifications—remain fully supported and integrated with time-anchored notes.

This feature streamlines cross-functional workflows by eliminating the need to track timecoded feedback in separate documents, chat threads, or emails. Teams producing demos, training videos, marketing content, or recorded presentations can now conduct precise, asynchronous reviews directly within Drive. While timestamped comments must be created on the web, mobile users viewing videos on iOS or Android will still see these entries formatted as standard file-level comments.

Getting started

  • Admins: This feature will be available by default for all users. There is no admin control for this feature.
  • End users: There is no end user setting for this feature. Visit the Help Center to learn more about commenting on videos.

Rollout pace

Availability

  • Available to all Google Workspace customers, Workspace Individual subscribers, and users with personal Google accounts

Resources