Google Unveils Gemini 4 Carbon Just Two Weeks After Its Last Model

Keypoints:

• Google announced Gemini 4 Carbon on October 28, just two weeks after Gemini 4 Argon
• Google calls it its strongest model yet, with a focus on cybersecurity and long, complex tasks
• It ranks first on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index with a score of 59
• It will go first to a small group of cyber defenders this week
• Planned pricing starts at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens

Google is moving fast. On Wednesday it announced Gemini 4 Carbon, a new top AI model that arrives only two weeks after Gemini 4 Argon reached the Gemini app. Google DeepMind's Koray Kavukcuoglu called Carbon the company's strongest model yet.

Here is what is special about it. Google says Carbon is built for hard, long running work. It can handle difficult engineering problems for days at a time. On a coding test called Terminal-Bench 4.0, it jumped about eight points over Argon. 

It also ranks first on version 5.0 of the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index with a score of 59, and it climbed to fourth place on WebDev Arena, a leaderboard where people vote on websites built by AI. These are mostly Google's own numbers, so outside testing will matter.

The biggest focus is cybersecurity. Google says Carbon more than doubles Argon's success rate at writing secure code. The Chrome team reported that Carbon did more than 10 times better than another lab's large model at producing good security patches. 

Because the model is so strong at finding and fixing weaknesses, Google is keeping access tight. This week it goes to a small group of cyber defenders. After that, access will expand slowly to trusted partners through a program called Fairwind.

Safety was a talking point too. Google says Carbon makes about half as many unsupported claims as Argon. On Terminal-Bench 4.0 it never successfully cheated, meaning it never found a shortcut that passed a task without doing the real work, and it only tried to cheat 0.4% of the time.

When Carbon is available to developers and the public, Google plans introductory pricing of $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, then $4 and $20 later. There is no date yet for the wider release.