OpenAI's frontier models and Codex become available on Google Cloud

OpenAI and Google Cloud announced on 21 October that OpenAI’s frontier models and its Codex coding agent would be offered through Google Cloud’s Model Garden. OpenAI’s post says customers will buy the models through the Google Cloud Marketplace and, if they have spending commitments with Google Cloud, can draw those down against the purchases. It adds that the models will soon be available in Google Antigravity and the Gemini Agent, and that general availability is “planned in the coming weeks”. It also states that Microsoft remains OpenAI’s primary cloud partner.

The specifics came from Google Cloud’s matching post. It names three models: GPT-6 Astra, GPT-6.1 Sol and GPT-6 Luna. They are rolling out in private preview to select enterprise customers, and developers can connect local Codex command-line and desktop workflows to Google’s Gemini platform for inference. Google said zero-data-retention options and Confidential Compute were still “coming soon”. It described Google Cloud as “the only hyperscale cloud provider offering access to all three leading closed source LLMs”, a claim that is Google’s own and which it did not itemise in the post. It quoted an executive at Box, an enterprise-content customer, in support.

The arrangement follows the April 2026 amendment to the Microsoft partnership, which ended Microsoft’s exclusivity and gave OpenAI the right to serve customers through other clouds, naming Google among them. The practical change for buyers is that a company standardised on Google Cloud can use OpenAI models under its existing contract, identity controls and data-governance setup rather than opening a separate OpenAI or Azure account.

The next day Anthropic announced that its full Claude Platform was generally available on Google Cloud in an offering Anthropic operates and in which it acts as data processor, with same-day access to new features, a single Google Cloud invoice and drawdown against existing commitments. Claude remains available through the Google-managed offering, where Google is the data processor. Within a day, then, models from both OpenAI and Anthropic were on sale through the cloud of a company that makes a competing model family.