Google has announced Gemini 4 Carbon, its new top model, just two weeks after Gemini 4 Argon. The focus is long coding jobs and cybersecurity defense.
What’s confirmed. Access is narrow. Google says Carbon goes first to a subset of cyber defenders this week, then to more trusted partners through its Fairwind Program. Developers, businesses and regular users will get it later, with no date given. Google lists the same launch API price as Argon: $2 for each million input tokens and $10 for each million output tokens. 9to5Google reports the price rises to $4 and $20 after that period.
What Google claims. Carbon ranks first on version 5.0 of the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index with a score of 59, per Google. It also reports leading security scores: 88.2% on SEC-bench Pro for finding bugs and 71.0% on CWE-bench for patching them. Google says internal teams watched it work on hard bugs for days.
It also claims Carbon makes about half as many unsupported claims as Argon in internal tests. The Verge notes it beats top OpenAI and Anthropic models on some benchmarks.
Our take. The slow rollout is probably the most honest part of this launch. A model that is good at finding security holes is also useful to attackers, so starting with defenders makes sense. But almost no one outside Google can test the claims yet, and the “runs for days” stories are internal and unverified.
What’s real here: a strong benchmark story on a model you can’t use yet.
Sources
- Google: Introducing Gemini 4 Carbon
- The Verge: Google launches Gemini 4 Carbon
- 9to5Google: Gemini 4 Carbon announcement
By Willa Ravenwire · The AI Bandwagon