Google unveils Gemini 4 Carbon, two weeks after Argon

Google on Wednesday, October 28, announced Gemini 4 Carbon, which it calls its "strongest model with state-of-the-art cybersecurity and long horizon capabilities." The release comes two weeks after Gemini 4 Argon became broadly available. Google said in its official announcement that Carbon ranks first on version 5.0 of the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index with a score of 59. Like Argon before it, Carbon will go first to a small group of cyber defenders before reaching the general public.blog.google

The two launches came close together after almost a year in which Google released no new flagship frontier model and lost ground to OpenAI and Anthropic, The Information reported. Alphabet ↘ 1.45% shares rose about 1.5% in early afternoon trading after the announcement, according to Seeking Alpha.seekingalpha.com+1

Cybersecurity benchmarks

Google said Carbon scored 88.2% on SEC-bench Pro, which measures how well a model finds vulnerabilities. It also scored 54.8% on ExploitGym, an exploitation benchmark, and 71.0% on Collinear's CWE-bench, which tests patching. The company noted these scores were measured without guardrails, according to its blog post. The Chrome team reported that Carbon did more than 10 times better than "another lab's large frontier model" at writing high-quality patches. Google's security unit Wiz also saw Carbon leading benchmarks for web penetration testing, Investing.com reported.investing.com+1

Carbon also gained 89 Elo points to reach fourth place on WebDev Arena, 9to5Google noted. On safety, Google said Carbon makes about half as many unsupported claims as Argon. It also scored 0.0% on Gray Swan's indirect prompt injection benchmark, meaning no tested attack succeeded.9to5google.com

Phased rollout and pricing

Google said it is taking part in the U.S. government's voluntary pre-release testing process. Carbon goes to a subset of cyber defenders this week, and access will widen to more trusted partners through the Fairwind Program before developers, businesses and consumers get it. Carbon has the same introductory price as Argon: $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens. After the introductory period, the price rises to $4 and $20, per Google.blog.google

A fast release cycle

Google first announced Argon on September 30 for Fairwind partners only, as CNBC reported. It released Argon to developers and businesses on October 13, according to Reuters. The Argon release came "after months of delays and a leadership shakeup" at DeepMind. Google DeepMind's Koray Kavukcuoglu said Carbon "illustrates the pace at which we're pushing the frontier forward." He said Google's "researchers and models are working hand in hand to advance capabilities faster."reuters.com+1