Google launches Deep Research Max: supports MCP and can access enterprise private data

According to Google DeepMind’s official blog announcement, Google launched its next-generation autonomous research agents, Deep Research and Deep Research Max, on April 21, 2026. They are built on Gemini 3.1 Pro, following the formal release after a preview version was provided via the Interactions API in December 2025. Both agents are now available under the paid Gemini API plans in the form of a public preview, and Google Cloud’s startups and enterprise customers will be able to onboard them one after another.

The two variants target different use cases: interactive vs. asynchronous deep work

Google segments the two agents by usage scenarios: Deep Research emphasizes speed and low latency, making it suitable for interactive user interfaces. Deep Research Max, on the other hand, trades longer test-time compute for comprehensiveness, making it suitable for asynchronous workflows, where the agent can run long-duration tasks independently.

On retrieval and reasoning benchmarks, Deep Research Max shows “significant” improvement compared with the December 2025 version, referencing more information sources and identifying details that were previously overlooked.

Supports MCP: Google’s first integration of the open standard championed by the Claude camp

Both agents support the Model Context Protocol (MCP), allowing users to connect their own dedicated data sources via MCP. MCP is an open standard introduced by Anthropic at the end of 2024 and that rapidly expanded throughout the first half of 2026; as of March 2026, the cumulative number of installations has already exceeded 97 million. Google’s official adoption of MCP within its Gemini agents symbolizes the AI agent industry beginning to converge on a shared tool-connection protocol.

Feature list: multimodal research, native charts, internal data mode

Key capabilities in the Deep Research series include multimodal research (supporting PDFs, CSV, images, audio, and video as research materials), native generated charts and infographics (HTML and Nano Banana formats), and collaborative planning with users (providing human review checkpoints before execution), intermediate reasoning processes streamed in real time, and an optional setting to disable network access—so the agent uses only enterprise internal data for research.

This “disable network” option has clear significance for enterprise security and compliance scenarios: industries such as legal, healthcare, and finance can prevent the agent from cross-retrieving internal sensitive data and public web content, reducing data leakage and compliance risks.

Competitive landscape: three major players’ research agents go head-to-head in the same week

Google’s Deep Research Max and OpenAI’s Codex “for (almost) everything” update in the same week (computer use, memory, 90+ plugins), as well as the Live Artifacts introduced by Anthropic in Cowork, create a positive showdown. The three leading firms publish clear products in the same week under “enterprise-grade autonomous research / production agents,” reflecting that AI agents have moved from experimental technology to a commercialization-focused positioning battle.

In the official announcement, the product manager for Deep Research Max, Lukas Haas, and the program manager, Srinivas Tadepalli, said that the launch of these two agents marks an industry shift for AI research agents—“from pure web summarization to integrating enterprise internal data, native visualization, and iterative refinement.”

This article, Google’s first to introduce Deep Research Max: supports MCP and can connect enterprise private data, first appeared in Lian Xin News ABMedia.