# v26.9.1, build 256 (2026-09-xx xx:xx UTC)
- Added tools that AI models can use on their own, starting with Web Search and Read Web Page. When you ask something a model cannot answer from what it knows, it now searches the web, reads the pages it found, and answers with the sources it used. You decide which tools a model may use, right below the message field, and you can watch it work: AI Studio shows which tool is running and, afterward, every call it made with its result. Whether tools are offered at all depends on the model because it has to support them. Read Web Page works right away; Web Search needs a SearXNG instance you or your organization runs, which you enter in the app settings. Many thanks to Peer Schütt (`peerschuett`) and Nils Kruthoff (`nilskruthoff`) for building this feature.
- Added safeguards around everything these tools bring back. Anything fetched from the web is treated as untrusted: AI Studio removes instructions hidden in a page before a model reads it and tells you when it did, exactly as it already does for the documents and web pages you load yourself. A model can never point a tool at your own network. Each tool states how much you have to trust a provider before it may be used with it, so your questions do not travel further than you allow. You can adjust that requirement per tool in the app settings.
- Added tools to the assistants. Each assistant has its own tool settings: which tools it starts with and whether you get to change them while you work. The chat, the coding assistant, and the Slide Builder always show the selection; for every other assistant you switch it on where you want it.
- Added tools to the Batch Processing assistant, so a batch run can look things up while it works through your documents. You choose them next to the instructions of the job, and every document is processed with the same set. The log file now records which tools were used for each document, and whether a call failed or was blocked, so you can tell how an answer came about.
- Added tools to the policies of the Document Analysis assistant. A policy states which tools an analysis may use, and the AI uses exactly those — nobody has to pick them per document. AI Studio warns you beforehand when the provider you selected is not trusted enough for a tool the policy names. IT departments can roll policies out together with their tools.
- Added tools to assistant plugins and direct-chat launchers. Plugin authors name them in the new `ToolIds` field, either as the tools an assistant runs with or as the tools a launcher preselects for the chat it opens; the example assistant plugin shows both. Which tools an assistant asks for is part of what you get to see before you enable it: its security card names them, and the security audit takes them into account.
- Added tools to the Assistant Builder. For a direct-chat launcher you pick them yourself, alongside the workspace, provider, and data sources. For an assistant, the AI chooses from the tools installed here and says so in the draft, so you see the decision before the assistant is written.
- Added organization-wide management for tools. IT departments can switch tools off entirely (`DataTools.EnableTools`), disable individual ones (`DataTools.DisabledToolIds`), raise the provider trust a tool requires (`DataTools.MinimumProviderConfidenceByToolId`), and manage every tool setting by tool and field name — either fixed (`DataTools.LockedToolSettings`) or as a pre-filled value the user may still change (`DataTools.DefaultToolSettings`). None of this needs to be known to AI Studio in advance, so it covers the tools future plugins will bring just as well. Secrets are the exception: they stay in the operating system's keyring, which no configuration file can write to. The example configuration plugin documents every setting of both tools.
- Added tool calling to the abilities you can state yourself in the expert provider settings. When you use a model AI Studio does not recognize as tool-capable, you can now declare that it is, the same way you already could for image input or reasoning.
- Improved loading web content in the assistants: it now uses the same reader as the Read Web Page tool, which extracts the main content of a page more reliably and skips navigation and boilerplate. Pages from your own network, including local servers, keep working as before. When a page cannot be read, AI Studio now says why instead of leaving the field empty.