Google Opens Android Studio to Outside AI Agents, Including Claude

Google has opened Android Studio, its tool for building Android apps, to outside AI agents. A new feature called Bring Your Own Agent uses an open standard, the Agent Client Protocol. Developers can now connect more than 40 agents, including Anthropic's Claude, OpenAI's Codex, and Google's own Antigravity. Google also added AppFunctions, an API built on the Model Context Protocol that lets agents call functions inside an app. There is also Agent-to-UI, an interface that lets agents show their own screens inside apps built with Compose, Google's toolkit for app interfaces. In Google's own internal tests, a new command-line preview feature for Compose handled UI tasks 77% faster. It also used up to three times fewer tokens, the units that AI models are priced and limited by. The same tests found that finding and fixing memory leaks, a common type of app bug, went almost twice as fast. That task also used about 25% fewer tokens.

The real news here is not the percentages. It is that Google's own development environment now treats Claude as an equal, not just an add-on next to its Gemini models. Choosing an open protocol over locking developers into one agent is the right call, even for a company that would probably rather steer people toward its own models. The speed and token numbers come from Google's own tests, with no outside verification, so the real-world gains are likely smaller.