Google launches Gemini 4 Argon, and almost nobody gets to use it
Google calls its new Gemini 4 Argon model its most powerful AI yet. It is built for coding, research, and cybersecurity — and for now, only a small group of cyber defenders gets access.
Google has a new flagship AI model. It is called Gemini 4 Argon. Almost no one can use it.
The company announced Argon on Wednesday, calling it its most powerful model yet. It is built for long, complicated work: software engineering, legal and finance research, and cybersecurity defense.
Google says Argon can find, check, and patch software vulnerabilities on its own. The model is going first to a small group of cybersecurity partners through the company's Fairwind program. Google is also taking part in the Trump administration's voluntary process for pre-release model access. There is no public release date.
Google says Argon outscores OpenAI's Astra and Anthropic's Opus on several industry benchmarks. Those numbers come from Google itself. On two of the four coding benchmarks Google published, Argon trailed its rivals.
The launch follows months of delays. Google scrapped plans for Gemini 3.5 Pro, which CEO Sundar Pichai had said would arrive in June. DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis stepped aside as the lab's CEO in August to become chair, and several leaders of the Gemini effort left the company.
Pricing starts at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, with cached inputs 95 percent off. Google says those rates rise to $4 and $20 later. Argon can produce up to one million tokens in a single response, up from 64,000 in earlier Gemini models.
Google says thousands of its own employees are already using the model. One quantum computing team beat a published baseline by 40 percent. Argon agents freed more than 300 tebibytes of memory across Google's data centers, with total estimated savings of 500 tebibytes to a petabyte. Another team is using it to move large C and C++ codebases to Rust, including more than 800,000 lines of the Fuchsia Zircon kernel.
Gemini now has more than one billion monthly users. Google is pitching Argon as its bid to close the gap with OpenAI and Anthropic after falling behind this year.
