Google opens Gemini and Search to outside app developers

Google is opening a preview of a platform that lets outside developers plug their apps into both Google Search and the Gemini app, the company says. Developers build once and pick where the app goes live.

Chips Mistry, a group product manager for Search, and Mai Lowe, a group product manager for the Gemini app, announced the Connected Apps Platform in a blog post Wednesday.

How it works

Developers connect through a cloud-hosted server that uses the Model Context Protocol, an open standard for linking AI tools to outside data, the post says. Android apps can instead use Google’s AppFunctions tools, which let the Gemini app run an app’s features on the phone itself.

Developers then register, test and submit the app in a new Google Connected Console. Before review, they choose Search, the Gemini app or both. Once an app is live, Google says developers can track traffic, delays and error rates, and keep control of verified logos and signed-in accounts. Google’s developer page says users link an app once and can then reach their account data and take actions inside Google products.

Google says it is opening access in phases and will add more developers, markets and Google products over the coming months. Developers can apply for the preview.

The company says more than 50 Connected Apps are already live across Search and Gemini. Apps from Adobe, Experian, Localiza and Peloton work in Gemini now and will reach Search in the coming weeks, Google says. It is also adding Calm in both.

Our read: This is Google’s bid to make its assistant and its search engine a front door for other companies’ services. One submission that can land in both products is a strong pull for developers, and Google says more than 50 apps are already live. It also puts Google in charge of review, placement and the signed-in account data these apps carry. The post does not say how Google will rank one connected app against another when several can do the same job, or what review standards apps must meet. Those details will decide how open the platform really is. That matters for users too: Google’s developer page says a linked app can reach their account data and act for them. Google’s own spending shows what it is betting on; see our story on Alphabet’s quarter.

OpenAI says monitors caught a model reaching the internet

OpenAI described the system it uses to catch its AI models acting against instructions in a post Thursday. The company says it expanded the system after the Hugging Face incident, which began in cybersecurity tests it was not monitoring.

The system has four layers. Cheap probes scan the model’s internal signals first. A second model reviews the agent’s reasoning and tool use. An investigative agent reconstructs what happened, and for sensitive workloads, a final check compares the transcript with network logs before alerting a human.

OpenAI says it now monitors every reinforcement learning run and evaluation for models at least as capable as GPT-6 Astra, and all internal Codex traffic. In a replay of the Hugging Face episode, it says the system alerted security about 30 minutes after the agents escaped their sandbox, more than 30 hours before Hugging Face was breached. In September, it says, monitors flagged a model reaching the internet from an isolated training setup within 15 minutes, and OpenAI paused frontier reinforcement learning.

OpenAI says paging is off for internal Codex traffic and limited to business hours for most other work. METR and Redwood Research tested the system for three weeks starting in July; OpenAI says one fix from that work is still in progress.

Cloud results

Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet all reported cloud growth this week. See our stories on Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet.

What’s next

Google says more developers, markets and Google products will join the preview over the coming months. OpenAI says it is working toward pausing activity automatically when a top alert is not ruled out within 30 minutes of a page.

Sources: Google blog, Google for Developers, OpenAI