Google releases Gemini 3.5 Flash at 3× the price of its predecessor, deploying it across consumer products and APIs

Simon Willison's Weblog · May 19, 2026

AI Summary

•Google released Gemini 3.5 Flash on May 19, 2026, with general availability via the Gemini app, Google Search AI Mode, Google Antigravity platform, Gemini API, and enterprise offerings. The model supports 1,048,576 input tokens and 65,536 maximum output tokens, with a knowledge cutoff of January 2025.
•Pricing increased significantly: Gemini 3.5 Flash costs $1.50/million input and $9/million output—3× the price of Gemini 3 Flash Preview and 6× the price of Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite. Running Artificial Analysis's benchmark on 3.5 Flash (high) cost $1,551.60, exceeding the cost of Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview ($892.28).
•Google is rolling out the costlier model across free consumer products alongside similar pricing moves by OpenAI (GPT-5.5 at 2× the price of GPT-5.4) and Anthropic (Claude Opus 4.7 at approximately 1.46× the price of 4.6), suggesting major AI labs are testing API customer price tolerance.

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