Harness 2 released by Google Today - Open source self improving Harness

Everyone can call the same frontier API

→ models are becoming a utility
→ the harness is where differentiation lives
→ Harness² is the first serious treatment of it (task-level + harnessing-level recursion, no verifier, 8 components)
→ why it lands harder for local AI: a frozen local model means the harness is literally your only lever
→ The bet: the moat won't be model access, it'll be a harness improved on your own task distribution.
Is the harness the real IP layer?
Harness 2 - open source
Paper