GOOGLE DROPS GEMINI 3.5 PRO TODAY WITH 2 MILLION TOKEN CONTEXT WINDOW AS AI ARMS RACE HITS NEW HIGH Google launched Gemini 3.5 Pro on July 17, and the timing could not be more deliberate. The model arrives on the opening day of the World AI Conference in Shanghai, where Xi Jinping is delivering the keynote address, turning today into the most contested single day in the brief history of the modern AI race. The new model was not simply updated from 2.5 Pro. Google scrapped the entire base layer and rebuilt it from scratch after engineers discovered critical failures in recursive tool-calling and SVG scene generation. The result carries a 2 million token context window, double what Gemini 2.5 Pro could handle, meaning users can now drop entire codebases, legal filings, or research archives into a single prompt and get coherent responses back. Deep Think reasoning, Google’s answer to chain-of-thought inference, ships on the $250 per month Ultra tier. API pricing sits around $1.25 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens. That positions it directly against OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol, which launched nine days earlier, and Anthropic’s Fable 5. The rebuild adds three more weeks of delay to a model that was already late. Google’s engineers chose quality over speed, and the question now is whether the market agrees it was worth the wait. Keywords: Google Gemini 3.5 Pro, AI model launch, 2 million token context window, AI arms race 2026