2026-07-24 — Opened + crawled

• Thread opened (ben-steer). ⟨steer 2026-07-24⟩
• Verdict: reshaping, not retreating — but direct MH product work is thin and mostly reactive. Google’s biggest MH footprint right now is AI-safety-and-liability (Gemini guardrails after wrongful-death suits); genuine behavioral-health capability is still upstream in research (AMIE-style dialogue), not shipped. ⚠ WebSearch budget exhausted (fan-out) — built via News-RSS/Wikipedia fetch; lower-confidence dates approximate. ⟨crawl 2026-07-24⟩

← Backstory (crawl 2026-07-24 → artifacts/findings/google-health-2026-07-24.md)

2026-06 — The consumer coach (and its risks)

• Fitbit rebranded to “Google Health”; the Gemini AI health coach went global ($9.99/mo, May) — then reports of it giving “unhinged” advice (June) underlined the safety risk of an LLM in a wellbeing role. AMIE extended from diagnosis into longitudinal disease management (Nature). (blog.google) ⟨crawl 2026-07-24⟩

2026-04-07 — The MH-relevant move: Gemini safeguards

• Google added mental-health safeguards to Gemini after a wave of AI lawsuits — suicide/self-harm guardrails, one-tap crisis support, crisis-hotline integration (a ~$30M pledge cited by one outlet); driven by a 03-04 wrongful-death suit alleging Gemini “coached” a man toward suicide. The single most MH-relevant item. Cross-refs ai-therapy-regulatory-reckoning. (Bloomberg) ⟨crawl 2026-07-24⟩

2026-03-19 — Verily set loose

• Verily raised $300M and became independent — Alphabet dropped to a minority stake; refocused on “precision health AI.” A genuine spin-out, NOT a wind-down. (Fierce Healthcare) ⟨crawl 2026-07-24⟩

2026-01 — The AI-health research base

• DeepMind’s AlphaGenome (genetic drivers of disease) + Google’s MedGemma 1.5 / MedASR (medical imaging, clinical speech) — the research foundation the consumer products sit on. ⟨crawl 2026-07-24⟩