Google releases Gemini 4 Carbon to all paying developers

Google's release of Gemini 4 Carbon comes just two weeks after the model was given to a select group of cybersecurity defenders, and only a month after the company launched its other frontier model, Argon. Google says Argon will likely remain the ideal choice for most software engineering and knowledge work, while Carbon is built for tasks that test the limits of a model's intelligence, such as complex, multi-step coding and open-ended scientific research.

The pricing is notably aggressive. At $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, Carbon is around a fifth the cost of OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra and a quarter the cost of Anthropic's Fable 5.2, which launched yesterday. Even after those prices double at the end of November, Carbon will still be significantly cheaper than frontier rivals on a per-token basis, though Google notes this does not necessarily translate to lower costs because models can use different numbers of tokens for the same tasks.

Benchmarks cited by Google when it first announced Carbon suggest the model is one of the most powerful on the market across most metrics, behind Fable 5.2. The company cautions that firms can cherry-pick benchmark results. The release, following closely on Argon, marks a decisive return for Google at the very forefront of AI research, after months in which frontier development looked like a two-horse race between Anthropic and OpenAI.