Google releases its asynchronous Jules AI agent for coding – how to try it for free

The race to deploy AI agents is heating up. At its annual I/O developer conference yesterday, Google announced that Jules, its new AI coding assistant, is now available worldwide in public beta.

The launch marks the company’s latest effort to corner the burgeoning market for AI agents, widely regarded across Silicon Valley as essentially a more practical and profitable form of chatbot. Virtually every other major tech giant — including Meta, OpenAI, and Amazon, just to name a few — has launched its own agent product in recent months.

(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, ZDNET’s parent company, filed an April 2025 lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)

Also: I tested ChatGPT’s Deep Research against Gemini, Perplexity, and Grok AI to see which is best

Originally unveiled by Google Labs in December, Jules is positioned as a reliable, automated coding assistant that can manage a broad suite of time-consuming tasks on behalf of human users. The model is “asynchronous,” which, in programming-speak, means it can start and work on tasks without having to wait for any single one of them to finish.

Afterward, the model provides a full outline of the changes that were made to a user’s code, providing clarity into its reasoning process.

Built upon Gemini 2.5 Pro

Jules is built upon Gemini 2.5 Pro, a large language model that Google debuted in March, describing it at the time as its “most advanced model for complex tasks.” Gemini 2.5 Pro outscored other industry-leading models, including OpenAI’s o3-mini and Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet, on key benchmarks like math and code editing.

As such, Jules offers some advanced coding capabilities. It can work directly within a user’s codebase, for example, absorbing a project’s full context and making decisions without the need for a sandbox (that is, a separate and controlled testing environment). It also integrates directly with GitHub, eliminating the need for developers to manually switch back and forth between coding platforms.

Also: Gemini Pro 2.5 is a stunningly capable coding assistant – and a big threat to ChatGPT

“We’re at a turning point: agentic development is shifting from prototype to product and quickly becoming central to how software gets built,” Kathy Koravec, director of product management at Google Labs, wrote in a company blog post published yesterday.

While Google has yet to officially clarify the inspiration behind the name for its new model, it could be a nod to the visionary science-fiction writer Jules Verne. Its logo, an octopus, could be a loose allusion to that author’s 1870 novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, which features not an octopus but a giant squid. The logo was also likely chosen to symbolize the model’s ability to manage multiple tasks at once, like the semiautonomous arms of an octopus.

Availability

Jules is now available for free in public beta, with some usage limitations. You can give it a try here.

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