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Google releases Gemini 4 Carbon, first to cyber defenders
Google announced Gemini 4 Carbon on Wednesday and called it its strongest model, two weeks after Gemini 4 Argon. Access starts with a subset of cyber defenders in Google's Fairwind Program, widening to more trusted partners, with developers, businesses and consumers promised "as soon as possible" and no date. Introductory pricing matches Argon at $2 per million input and $10 per million output tokens; a footnote sets the later rate at $4 and $20 A. Google's own cyber numbers lead the post: 88.2% on SEC-bench Pro for finding vulnerabilities and 54.8% on ExploitGym for exploiting them, both run without A.
Artificial Analysis puts Carbon first on its Intelligence Index at 59, one point ahead of Claude Opus 5.5 and two ahead of GPT-6 Astra B. The same tests show the costs. Its hallucination rate on AA-Omniscience rose to 11% from Argon's 4% even as it answered more questions correctly, Claude Code with Opus 5.5 still leads the coding-agent index at 62 against Carbon's 59, and there is no public or technical report yet B. A model whose launch audience is people who find software flaws for a living is the clearest statement yet that the labs now treat offensive cyber capability as the gating risk. SourcesABB
Sources
- AGemini 4 Carbon: our next frontier model (Google)blog.google
- BGoogle unveils Gemini 4 Carbon (VentureBeat)venturebeat.com
- BGoogle announces Gemini 4 Carbon (9to5Google)9to5google.com
This story ran in the Afternoon Brief of October 28th 2026.