For the last two years, the fundamental unit of generative AI development has been the "completion."

You send a text prompt to a model, it sends text back, and the transaction ends. If you want to continue the conversation, you have to send the entire history back to the model again. This "stateless" architecture—embodied by Google's legacy generateContent endpoint—was perfect for simple chatbots. But as developers move toward autonomous agents that use tools, maintain complex states, and "think" over long horizons, that stateless model has become a distinct bottleneck.

Last week, Google DeepMind finally addressed this infrastructure gap with the public beta launch of the Interactions API (/interactions).

While OpenAI began this shift back in March 2025 with its Responses API, Google’s entry signals its own efforts to advance the state-of-the-art. The Interactions API is not just a state management tool; it is a unified interface designed to treat LLMs less like text generators and more like remote operating systems.

The 'Remote Compute' Model

The core innovation of the Interactions API is the introduction of server-side state as a default behavior.

Previously, a developer building a complex agent had to manually manage a growing JSON list of every "user" and "model" turn, sending megabytes of history back and forth with every request. With the new API, developers simply pass a previous_interaction_id. Google’s infrastructure retains the conversation history, tool outputs, and "thought" processes on their end.

"Models are becoming systems and over time, might even become agents themselves," wrote DeepMind's Ali Çevik and Philipp Schmid, in an official company blog post on the new paradigm. "Trying to force these capabilities into generateContent would have resulted in an overly complex and fragile API."

This shift enables Background Execution, a critical feature for the agentic era. Complex workflows—like browsing the web for an hour to synthesize a report—often trigger HTTP timeouts in standard APIs. The Interactions API allows developers to trigger an agent with background=true, disconnect, and poll for the result later. I...