The company’s latest artificial intelligence model targets coding and security tasks while matching the introductory price of Gemini 4 Argon.
Google has introduced Gemini 4 Carbon, a new flagship artificial intelligence model designed to tackle complex coding and cybersecurity workloads, The Register reported. The rollout comes just two weeks after the company launched Gemini 4 Argon, presenting Carbon as its most capable model to date.
Koray Kavukcuoglu, senior vice president at Google DeepMind and Google’s chief AI architect, said Carbon stands out as the company’s strongest system yet, particularly for long-running computer tasks and digital defense. According to reporting by Engadget, Google stated that the model highlights how quickly it is pushing frontier development forward.
What the model can do
Google is highlighting Carbon’s performance in software development and security analysis. The company reported that the system excels at detecting and prioritizing software vulnerabilities, as well as fixing them at their underlying cause. Kavukcuoglu noted that the model shows strong progress in code defense: “On internal benchmarks, Carbon achieves more than 2x uplift in success rate for generating secure code over Argon.”
In addition, Google’s Chrome development team found that Carbon performed more than ten times better at generating high-quality security patches than a large frontier model from a competing laboratory. Google also stated that the system improves safety and reliability by curbing shortcuts, reducing loophole exploitation, boosting honesty on tests measuring unsupported claims, resisting prompt injection, and cooperating on tasks without overstepping its bounds.
On independent tests, model evaluation service Artificial Analysis placed Carbon at the top of its Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v5 with a score of 59, edging out Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5 and OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra. Google reported near-sweep results across general evaluation categories, including computer use, agentic coding, knowledge work, science, and mathematics.
On other public leaderboards, Carbon took first place on SEC-bench Pro, ExploitGym, and CWE-bench. It took second place behind Claude Code Opus 5.5 on the Artificial Analysis Coding Agent Index, and second place behind Opus 5.5 on the Arena.ai leaderboard for Best Overall Agent. On WebDev Arena, Carbon placed fourth, trailing Opus 5.5, GPT-6.1 Astra, and Sonnet 5.5.
How Google is pricing Carbon
Google is offering Carbon at a temporary introductory rate of $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, matching the initial price of Argon. Once that introductory window ends, Google plans to double those rates to $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output tokens.
That higher standard rate matches the regular pricing for Claude Opus 5.5, indicating that Google views Anthropic as Carbon’s direct rival. The competition between the two firms comes as Anthropic prepares for a planned public listing on the Nasdaq.
Addressing the company’s third-quarter 2026 financial results, Alphabet and Google chief executive Sundar Pichai said, “Gemini 4 Argon and Carbon are now leading at the frontier.” Pichai stated that Google’s first-party model application programming interfaces process nearly 32 billion tokens per minute, more than four times the rate handled a year earlier. Nate Elliott, a principal analyst at Emarketer, pointed out that Google pointedly referenced its half-trillion-dollar revenue run rate in its earnings report, putting its financial scale at almost ten times that of OpenAI or Anthropic.
Background and previous rollout
Carbon arrives shortly after questions surfaced last month over Google’s ability to keep pace with AI competitors following leadership changes inside its DeepMind subsidiary. The release also closely tracks the rollout pattern established for Gemini 4 Argon two weeks ago.
When Google initially launched Argon, it provided early access to cybersecurity specialists before widening availability to subscribers and software developers. Gemini 4 Argon has since expanded into general consumer products, where it now runs inside the Gemini application and the company’s AI search mode.
What happens next
Google is releasing Carbon this week to an initial group of select cybersecurity defense companies to conduct pre-release testing. Following that initial trial, the company plans to broaden access to trusted external partners through its Fairwind program.
Google said it intends to make Gemini 4 Carbon widely available as soon as possible, though it has not yet announced a specific date for general release or set an expiration date for the introductory token pricing.
