Google is in talks to pay roughly $1.5 billion for a non-exclusive license to Mechanize’s technology and to hire some of the startup’s model evaluation and development staff, according to four people who spoke to Business Insider. Mechanize builds simulated work environments, benchmarks, and grading systems used to train and test AI agents on business tasks, and its stated long-term aim is automating knowledge work across the economy. Google wants the technology for its coding agents, which are regarded as weaker than Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex. Licensing plus hiring rather than buying the company avoids the antitrust review a full acquisition draws, and Google used the same structure with Windsurf, whose former CEO Varun Mohan now runs its Antigravity coding platform.
