Google announces Gemini 4 Argon AI model

Google released its latest Gemini model, marketing it as a workhorse for coding and cybersecurity work. Google parent company Alphabet launched Gemini 4 Argon, a new AI model built to handle a variety of tasks such as coding, research, and writing. But it’s cybersecurity that Gemini 4 Argon is supposed to have a particular knack for, according to Google.

Argon is only being rolled out to a select group of the company’s cyber partners through its Fairwind Program, Google’s security initiative. The model was trained specifically for defensive cyber work, and the company says it can “autonomously find, validate, and patch critical software vulnerabilities.” Argon is also said to be good at coding and engineering, with the company noting that its own staff have already been using the model for their daily work, including debugging and codebase migrations. Google also touts Argon’s ability to parse visuals — whether that’s analyzing the contents of long videos or charts.

“Built to sustain deep reasoning across complex, long-horizon workflows, Argon is fundamentally changing the way we work and build at Google,” the company said in a blog post Wednesday. Top AI labs have rushed to release increasingly powerful models, attempting to outdo each other even as those very same firms warn that AI could spin out of control. Not long ago, OpenAI released Astra — which it hailed as its best model yet.

Earlier this year, Anthropic’s Fable was also released with similar rhetoric from the company. Firms have done their best to market their services as superior to their competitors. In its blog, Google claims that Argon scored significantly higher than OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra and Anthropic’s Fable and Opus models across a variety of AI benchmarks.

So much for Gemini 3.5 Pro. Text settings Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only Learn more Minimize to nav Google promised Gemini 3.5 Pro in June, but it spent the summer trotting out smaller Flash models.

Now, Google is ready to take on the frontier again with Gemini 4 Argon. The company claims this new AI offers industry-leading performance in coding, knowledge work, and cybersecurity, but you aren’t allowed to use it yet.

While most of us will have to wait to test Gemini 4, Google says engineers inside the company are already using the new model extensively. Argon reportedly used “fleet-wide telemetry data” to help Google save 300 TiB of memory across its data centers.

Meanwhile, Argon agents have been working to migrate C/C++ codebases to Rust across Google, including thousands of lines in the core re2 and libgav1 libraries and more than 800,000 lines in the Fuchsia OS Zircon kernel. Google has also come armed with a raft of benchmarks to back up its claims.

On the software engineering DeepSWE v1.1 benchmark, Gemini 4 Argon hits 77.9 percent, which is higher than GPT-6 Astra, Fable 5.1, and Opus 5.5. Google promises similar power across a range of long-horizon tasks, pointing to Argon’s industry-leading score in the economic analysis Vals Index test.

For a limited time, Argon will offer rates of $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, and cached input tokens will be discounted 95 percent. The company has also confirmed that Gemini 4 Argon will support a much higher output limit of 1 million tokens.

That’s up from 64,000 tokens in previous Gemini models. Google says this lets users complete more daunting tasks in a single step.

The main focus for Gemini 4 right now is cyberdefense. Google says models of this scale call for a phased release, so it’s starting with a small group of trusted testers.

Partners in the company’s Fairwind Program can get access to uses the model’s cybersecurity defense capabilities. Wiz is apparently already using Argon and has used it to uncover a critical vulnerability that could expose personal information in a system used at hospitals around the world.

Google claims other frontier models missed this flaw, but it didn’t provide any specifics. There’s a lot of hand-wringing about model misalignment after several high-profile hacking incidents over the summer.

Google claims it designed Argon with systems that monitor the model’s chain-of-thought and can stop it in its tracks if the model steps out of bounds. This, Google says, is why reasoning transparency is important in frontier model development.

Gemini 4 Argon will eventually be available to enterprise and consumer customers, but Google isn’t making any specific timeline promises. We do know that following the cybersecurity tests, general availability will start with paid API users and Google AI Ultra subscribers.

Ryan Whitwam Senior Technology Reporter Ryan Whitwam Senior Technology Reporter Ryan Whitwam is a senior technology reporter covering the ways Google, AI, and mobile technology continue to change the world. Over his 20-year career, he's written for ExtremeTech, Wirecutter, NY Times, and more.

He has reviewed more phones than most people will ever own. You can follow him on Bluesky, where you will see photos of his dozens of mechanical keyboards.