By Roman Aglaganov
OpenAI and Google announced on 21 October that OpenAI’s frontier models and its Codex agentic workflows are coming to Model Garden, the catalogue of AI models on Google Cloud. The two companies compete fiercely in chatbots, and Google Cloud already offers Google’s own Gemini models and Anthropic’s Claude.
How it will work
Customers will buy access through Google Cloud Marketplace and, according to OpenAI, can count eligible spending commitments they already have with Google Cloud towards it. It starts as a private preview for selected enterprise customers, with general availability planned in the coming weeks. The companies said OpenAI’s models will also come to Google Antigravity, Google’s coding tool, and the Gemini Agent “soon”.
OpenAI said bringing its models to Model Garden lets teams use them “within the environment where they already work”.
The bigger shift
Reuters, as reported by PYMNTS, said the deal fits a wider change: the big cloud providers are becoming the main sales channels for frontier AI labs, taking a cut of each sale. It cited Google Cloud chief executive Thomas Kurian’s earlier remarks that the platform welcomes any model popular with developers. Anthropic, which is backed by both Amazon and Google, earned 47% of its 2025 revenue through those companies’ cloud platforms, according to its draft IPO filing, Reuters added.
Why it matters
Businesses increasingly want to pick the best model for each job without signing new contracts or moving their data. For OpenAI, being on every major cloud means more customers. For Google, hosting a rival’s models keeps those customers, and their spending, on Google Cloud.
