---
title: "Introducing the Google Colab CLI"
description: "Google announces the Google Colab Command-Line Interface (CLI), a tool that connects a local terminal with remote Colab runtimes for developers and AI agents. It can provision GPUs or TPUs with commands such as colab --gpu A100, execute local Python scripts and ML pipelines remotely with colab exec, recover artifacts and replayable .ipynb logs, and provide interactive access through colab repl or colab console. The source demonstrates an agent-driven QLoRA fine-tuning workflow for google/gemma-3-1b-it on a Text-to-SQL dataset: an Antigravity agent provisions a T4, installs transformers, datasets, peft, trl, bitsandbytes, and accelerate, runs finetune_run.py, saves a notebook log, downloads model artifacts, and stops the runtime. The resulting safetensors adapter and configuration files can be loaded locally, while the CLI is presented as programmable and usable by terminal-based agents."
---

# Introducing the Google Colab CLI

[Google](https://yomu.fyi/company/google) · Spencer Shumway, Tyler Pirtle, Seth Troisi · Jun 5, 2026

**Type:** Announcement

## Summary

Google announces the Google Colab Command-Line Interface (CLI), a tool that connects a local terminal with remote Colab runtimes for developers and AI agents. It can provision GPUs or TPUs with commands such as colab --gpu A100, execute local Python scripts and ML pipelines remotely with colab exec, recover artifacts and replayable .ipynb logs, and provide interactive access through colab repl or colab console. The source demonstrates an agent-driven QLoRA fine-tuning workflow for google/gemma-3-1b-it on a Text-to-SQL dataset: an Antigravity agent provisions a T4, installs transformers, datasets, peft, trl, bitsandbytes, and accelerate, runs finetune\_run.py, saves a notebook log, downloads model artifacts, and stops the runtime. The resulting safetensors adapter and configuration files can be loaded locally, while the CLI is presented as programmable and usable by terminal-based agents.

## Context

The CLI is introduced to bridge the gap between local terminals and remote Colab runtimes and to make accelerator-backed execution available to terminal-based AI agents.

## Approach / What changed

The CLI provides commands for provisioning GPUs or TPUs, executing local scripts remotely, installing packages, downloading artifacts, saving notebook logs, opening interactive sessions, and stopping runtimes. A prepackaged Colab skill file supplies agents with usage context.

## Takeaways

- The CLI supports remote execution through commands including colab exec, interactive access through colab repl or colab console, and artifact recovery through colab download and colab log.
- The demonstrated workflow uses a Colab T4 to run QLoRA fine-tuning for google/gemma-3-1b-it on a Text-to-SQL dataset.
- Downloaded safetensors adapters, adapter configuration, tokenizer configuration, and tokenizer files can be used to load the fine-tuned model locally.

**Tags:** [AI Agents](https://yomu.fyi/topic/ai-agents), [Colab](https://yomu.fyi/topic/colab), [GPU](https://yomu.fyi/topic/gpu), [Python](https://yomu.fyi/topic/python)

- Source: [Google](https://developers.googleblog.com/introducing-the-google-colab-cli)
- Source URL: https://developers.googleblog.com/introducing-the-google-colab-cli
- Ingested by Yomu: 2026-09-09T14:29:55.749Z

[Read original post](https://developers.googleblog.com/introducing-the-google-colab-cli)