Google ships Gemini 4 Argon, starting with cyber defenders

What happened: On 30 September 2026, Google DeepMind announced Gemini 4 Argon. It is the company's first new frontier model generation since Gemini 3. Google is aiming it at long-horizon coding, legal and finance work, and cyber defence.

The rollout: Trusted cyber defenders in Google's Fairwind Program get it first, along with US government pre-release access. Paid API users and Google AI Ultra subscribers follow. Google says broader developer, enterprise and consumer release is "coming soon".

The numbers: Introductory pricing is $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, with cached input 95% off. After the introductory period, it rises to $4 and $20. The output limit goes to 1 million tokens, up from 64K, which Google bills as industry-leading.

The benchmarks: These are Google's own figures.

Google also says Argon leads the Vals Index across finance, coding, legal and tax, and leads Gray Swan prompt-injection robustness.

The rivals: Google positions Argon against OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra and Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5.

In their words: Koray Kavukcuoglu, SVP of Google DeepMind and Chief AI Architect, wrote in the launch post: "Argon is helping our quantum computing researchers optimize the spacetime resources (qubits × gates)"

The catch: Bloomberg reported that some Google employees privately doubt Argon's real-world coding ability. Google has not confirmed this. CNBC asked whether Argon can catch the frontier. One analyst said "the final proof will be in enterprise production environments once the model is fully released".

What's next: Google has given no date for the wider release to developers, enterprises and consumers. The introductory prices apply until the higher rates start.