Google ships Gemini 4 Argon worldwide at $2 input

Google's launch of Gemini 4 Argon today puts a new frontier model into the hands of developers, businesses, and consumers worldwide. The rollout follows a roughly two-week delay in shipping, which allowed competitors like Meta's Muse Wonder Full to reach the market first. Despite that, Argon claims the top spot on the Vals Index, though it still trails Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 in independent overall rankings.

Internally, Google reports that Argon has already changed how its own engineers work. Agent-driven code submissions rose by more than 35 percent, while code rollbacks fell by nearly a third. In the Chromium project, Argon helped complete an architectural refactor across hundreds of files in a 40-million-line codebase, work that would normally take months. Google is reportedly testing a successor codenamed "Carbon" that is supposed to outperform Argon at coding.

The model also comes with an aggressive pricing structure: $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens at the introductory rate, with a 95 percent discount on cached inputs. Google is offering 10,000 researchers free access to the highest usage tier of Antigravity for six months, and cybersecurity defenders can apply for the Fairwind program to use Argon without cyber safeguards. On safety, Google says external red teaming in the bio domain bypassed fewer than 1 percent of tested safety checks, and violations dropped by nearly half compared to earlier Gemini models.