Google finally ships Gemini 4 Argon

After months spent on the sidelines of the frontier AI race, Google has launched its long-awaited Gemini 4 Argon, claiming it can compete with the best the industry has to offer.

Google says Argon delivers "frontier reasoning and improved performance across complex workflows" while cutting back on the hedging, repetition, and cliches that still plague AI chatbots. The company claims the model outperforms rivals — GPT-6 Astra, Claude Fable 5.1, and Claude Opus 5.5 — across a range of benchmarks spanning coding, cybersecurity, science, finance, and law.

Already in use inside Google

Google says it is already putting Argon to work internally: finding and patching security vulnerabilities, halving the computing power needed to run YouTube's comments section, and debugging the drone physics simulator for Alphabet's drone delivery outfit, Wing.

The model is rolling out to higher-tier Pro and Ultra subscribers in the Gemini app and AI mode in Search, as well as to Ultra subscribers on its agentic development platform Antigravity. When — or whether — Argon will reach Plus subscribers or free users remains unclear.

Aggressive pricing

Google has priced Argon very competitively. It launches at an introductory rate of $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens — roughly a fifth the cost of OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra and Anthropic's Fable 5 models. Even after those prices double at the end of November, when the introductory period ends, Argon will remain significantly cheaper than its frontier rivals per token — though that doesn't necessarily mean lower real-world costs, since different models can burn through different numbers of tokens on the same task.

The launch fills in some of the blanks left after Google first teased Argon a few weeks ago. In line with other recent frontier releases, the public rollout followed a limited release to a select group of "trusted cyber defenders" tasked with probing it for potential risks.

Argon is Google's first major frontier release since Gemini 3 in late 2025. In the intervening months, impressive models from Anthropic and OpenAI left Google trailing far behind, and seismic internal shakeups raised further doubts about the company's ability — or desire — to reclaim its position. But Argon's arrival suggests Google can't be counted out just yet. Landing a single day after Meta unveiled its own frontier model, Muse Wonder Full, it is a reminder of how quickly the balance of power can shift in AI, and that the frontier is far from a two-horse race.

Source: The Verge