Tech Updates — Sep 14 – Sep 20, 2026

This week's biggest signal is Gemini Enterprise expanding its model and connector lineup — Grok 4.6 reached general availability and Microsoft 365 connectors gained new preview actions — while Data saw a cluster of GA milestones for BigQuery, Dataform, and Spanner testing and messaging features. AI/ML, Infrastructure, Data, and AppDev all had material changes; General Google Cloud was quiet this week.

Highlights

• xAI's Grok 4.6 is now generally available in Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform for production use on the global endpoint and the US multi-region endpoint. — Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform release notes, Sep 18
• Model Armor's filter version v4 is now the default under the Latest alias, while v1 and v2 transition to Legacy status and retire on December 17, 2026, so teams pinned to older filter versions should plan a migration. — Model Armor release notes, Sep 18
• Managed workload identity for backend mTLS is now generally available for global and regional external Application Load Balancers and for regional and cross-region internal Application Load Balancers, automating certificate issuance, rotation, and trust management via Certificate Authority Service and Certificate Manager. — Cloud Load Balancing release notes, Sep 18
• Unit tests for BigQuery pipelines, which validate SQL transformation logic against mock datasets, are now generally available. — BigQuery release notes, Sep 17
• Spanner queues are now generally available, providing transactional messaging for building event-driven applications on Spanner. — Spanner release notes, Sep 17

Further Reading

• AI/ML
• Infrastructure
• Data
• AppDev
• General Google Cloud