Google’s Gemini 4 Argon goes first to cyber defenders

Google on Wednesday announced Gemini 4 Argon, which it calls its new frontier model. For now, it is rolling out to “a set of trusted cyber defenders” through Google’s Fairwind Program, according to a post by Koray Kavukcuoglu, Google’s chief AI architect.

Who gets it, and when. Google says it will gather feedback from those early testers and keep refining its guardrails before making Argon available to developers, enterprises and consumers “as soon as possible,” starting with paid API customers and Google AI Ultra subscribers. It gave no date. Google says it is also taking part in the U.S. government’s voluntary process for pre-release model access.

What it costs. Google says Argon will launch at an introductory price of $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, with cached input priced 95% below the input rate. After the introductory period ends, the price rises to $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output tokens, the company says. It did not say how long the introductory period lasts. The introductory rate matches what OpenAI lists for GPT-6.1 Sol, released Tuesday.

What it does. Google says it raised Argon’s output token limit to 1 million tokens, up from 64,000, so the model can reason through long, multi-step problems in one go. The post does not give a context window. The company says Argon sets a new state of the art on the DeepSWE v1.1 coding benchmark, at 77.9%, and is the leading model on the Vals Index, which covers finance, coding, legal and tax work. It also says Argon ranks first on Zapier’s AutomationBench, at 51.3%.

The cyber piece. Google says it trained Argon to find, validate and patch critical software vulnerabilities on its own. For trusted defenders and its own internal teams, Google says, it will release Argon “without cyber guardrails.” It says the security firm Wiz used the model to find a critical vulnerability exposing personal information in healthcare software used by hospitals. Google also says Argon is designed to refuse requests to help with cyber or chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear attacks, and that it is strengthening those safeguards before a broad release.

Last week, Google added a talking video avatar to Gemini 3.8 Live for business customers.

— Rowan Keel