Google Releases Gemini 4 Argon to Cyber Defenders First

Google on September 30 announced Gemini 4 Argon, a new frontier model it is giving first to a group of vetted cyber defenders in its Fairwind Program rather than to the public. Google says those members can use Argon to find and fix flaws in their software before the model is made more widely available.

For developers, the headline numbers are price and output length. Argon will launch at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, with cached input tokens 95% cheaper, and its output limit jumps to 1 million tokens.

Wider access will come in stages. Google says paid API customers and Google AI Ultra subscribers will be first, followed by developers, enterprises and consumers. It gave no dates. The company also says it is participating in the U.S. government's voluntary process for pre-release model access.

After the introductory period ends, the price rises to $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output tokens. Google did not say how long the introductory period will last.

The 1 million token output limit compares with 64,000 tokens previously.

All performance figures come from Google. It reports a 77.9% score on DeepSWE v1.1, a long-horizon software engineering test, and says Argon leads the Vals Index, which weights finance, coding, legal and tax work by their share of U.S. GDP. Google also claims Argon outscored OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra and Anthropic's Fable and Opus models on a range of benchmarks. AI Briefing News has not independently verified these results.

The cybersecurity release is the unusual part. Google says trusted defenders and its own internal teams will get a version of Argon without cyber guardrails. Cloud security firm Wiz is already using the model in its free infrastructure-protection program, and Google says Argon found a critical flaw in hospital software that earlier frontier models had missed.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai said on X that Argon "shows frontier performance in complex workflows, cyber defense and software engineering."

Not everyone at Google is convinced. Bloomberg reported ahead of the launch that some inside the company worry Argon is not as powerful as offerings from Anthropic or OpenAI.

Google's announcement did not include a technical report, a public API model ID, or methodology for its benchmark results.

Argon follows Google's cancellation of Gemini 3.5 Pro and its focus on the Gemini 3.8 Flash line. Google previously released 3.8 Flash Cyber, a security-focused model that Argon now outperforms on vulnerability remediation tests, according to Google.