Cloud Next 2026: Agentic AI Defence with Google Cloud

Google Cloud Next 2026, held in Las Vegas, delivered significant developments for security teams, with Google Cloud unveiling new defensive capabilities designed to counter AI-powered threats.

The announcements signal a major shift towards autonomous security operations, with AI agents now taking on advanced threat hunting and detection engineering roles.

Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, reflects on the company's trajectory in his keynote: "When we gathered at Next a year ago, we talked about how genAI was transforming organisations around the world.

"Today, that future is in-production – the Agentic Enterprise is real – and deployed at a scale the world has never before seen."

Over the past year, Google Cloud has rapidly scaled its AI infrastructure and services, reflecting rising demand from organisations deploying advanced machine learning tools.

The company's first-party models currently process more than 16 billion tokens per minute through direct API usage, a sharp increase from 10 billion in the previous quarter.

This surge could indicate the growing integration of AI-driven applications across security operations and enterprise environments.

The new announcements unveiled by Google Cloud include Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, Gemini Enterprise app, Agentic Data Cloud, Agentic Defense and an Agentic Taskforce.

On the infrastructure side, the company brought out the eighth-generation of Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) for accelerated training.

Managing autonomous security at scale

It autumn 2025, Google introduced the Gemini Enterprise, an end-to-end system that Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, calls the "connective tissue between your data, your people and your goals."

The platform achieved 40% growth in paid monthly active users in Q1, demonstrating rapid adoption across enterprise environments.

"Through this rapid growth, we've seen how every employee in every organisation can become a builder," Sundar says.

"This is an incredible shift, but it comes with complexity.

"The conversation has gone from 'Can we build an agent?' to 'How do we manage thousands of them?'"

"That's why we're introducing our new Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform," Pichai continued.

"It provides the secure, full-stack connective tissue you need to build, scale, govern and optimise your agents with confidence – a mission control for the agentic enterprise."

For security operations centres managing multiple AI-driven defensive tools, the platform could provide centralised governance and performance optimisation across large-scale deployments.

This becomes particularly relevant as organisations deploy numerous autonomous agents for threat detection, response and investigation.

AI-powered defensive capabilities emerge

Realising that the antidote to AI powered offence is agentic AI optimised for defence, Google Cloud unveiled major AI security updates at Cloud Next. 

Google Cloud's new Threat Hunting agent has been developed to proactively identify novel attack patterns and adversary behaviours that might evade traditional defensive measures.

A new Detection Engineering agent is also available in preview, capable of identifying gaps in security coverage and creating new detections for emerging threats.

Third-Party Context agent, another agent soon to come, can provide security teams with contextual information from third-party intelligence sources.

"Not only can Google action insights from the world's largest threat observatory and Mandiant frontline experts but we also bring cutting-edge insights and breakthroughs from Google DeepMind, to help make your platforms more secure," says Francis deSouza, COO at Google Cloud and President of Security Products.

"Today we are introducing three new agents in Google Security Operations to help you defend at the speed of AI."

These agents could represent a shift in how security operations centres function, potentially enabling smaller teams to monitor larger attack surfaces whilst maintaining rapid response capabilities.

Wiz integration strengthens cloud security

Following Google's acquisition of Wiz in earlier months, the combination of Wiz's Cloud and AI Security Platform with Google's Threat Intelligence aims to deliver enhanced agentic defence capabilities.

A key development is the launch of Wiz's AI Application Protection Platform, which offers autonomous security from code to cloud to runtime.

The platform is designed to safeguard multicloud, hybrid and AI systems, addressing vulnerabilities before they could escalate into major security incidents.

For organisations running complex cloud environments, this integrated approach could provide visibility across previously siloed security domains.

There has also been new infrastructure announcements – Google's eighth-generation TPUs are engineered for both training and inference, delivering improvements in performance and efficiency.

With the ability to scale across thousands of units and handle massive data volumes, they are built to power modern AI workloads.

Beyond external products, Google continues to deploy AI internally across its operations.

"We've been using AI to generate code internally at Google for a while," the Google CEO notes. 

"Today, 75% of all new code at Google is now AI-generated and approved by engineers, up from 50% in autumn 2025."

This internal adoption could provide insights into how AI agents perform under enterprise-scale requirements.

Together, these developments underscore Google Cloud's strategy to position autonomous agents as central to modern security operations, combining threat intelligence with AI-driven detection and response capabilities to address increasingly sophisticated attack vectors.