Google Unveils Gemini 4 Argon, Pricing It Well Below Rivals

Google launched Gemini 4 Argon, its latest flagship AI model, touting its abilities in cybersecurity defense and coding, legal and finance work. The company hasn’t launched such a frontier model in nearly a year, prompting questions about whether it could stay in the race with Anthropic and OpenAI.

The search giant is pricing the new model well below leading offerings from those rivals. Argon will start at an introductory price of $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, then double that rate after the teaser period expires. Even the higher rate would be significantly less than the price of GPT-6 Astra, OpenAI’s most powerful model, and Claude Fable 5.1, the top model from Anthropic.

Similar to phased rollouts that other leading AI labs have done for new frontier models, Google said it is releasing Argon first to cybersecurity partners that are part of its Fairwind Program, which enables participants to use the technology to discover and fix potential software vulnerabilities in their systems. The company said it is developing so-called safeguards to prevent misuse before releasing the model more broadly, though it didn’t specify a timeline.

Koray Kavukcuoglu, Google’s chief AI architect and leader of its Google DeepMind unit, told The Information last week at the AI Agenda Live conference that the company was nearing the release of Gemini 4 and that it would “continue the fast-paced iterations” after that.

Google’s last next-generation flagship model was Gemini 3, released in November of last year, though it has since updated that and released a series of smaller, Flash models.