Google Releases Gemini 4 Carbon to Cyber Defenders Ahead of Developers

Google on Wednesday announced Gemini 4 Carbon, a frontier model it is releasing first to a subset of cyber defenders this week, with access to more trusted partners rolling out gradually through its Fairwind Program. Google said it will keep gathering feedback and refining guardrails before offering Carbon to developers, businesses and consumers.

For most AI Briefing News readers, that means Carbon isn't available to build with yet. Google has not said when wider access will follow.

Google's case for the model rests on cybersecurity. It reports 88.2% on SEC-bench Pro, a benchmark for finding vulnerabilities, 54.8% on the ExploitGym exploitation benchmark and 71.0% on CWE-bench for patching, scores Google describes as state of the art. Google notes those external results were measured without guardrails. The figures are Google's own claims, and no independent testing has been published yet.

Google also says Carbon ranks first, at 59, on version 5.0 of the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index. AI Briefing News has not independently confirmed that ranking. Google's comparison shows Carbon ahead of OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra and Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 on selected coding and cybersecurity tests.

Carbon will launch at the same introductory price as Gemini 4 Argon, $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, with cached input 95% cheaper; after the introductory period, prices rise to $4 and $20.

Google is pitching the model for long, multi-step work. It says internal teams have seen Carbon keep working for days on complex engineering tasks, such as tracing and patching subtle bugs across large codebases.

The announcement also makes several alignment claims, all from Google's internal testing. Google says Carbon reduced successful cheating on Terminal-Bench 4.0 to 0.0%, with cheating attempts at 0.4%, and that high-severity misalignment alerts in live internal coding fell by almost 80%. It also reports a 0.0% attack success rate on Gray Swan's indirect prompt injection benchmark, down from 0.7% for Argon.

Google said it is taking part in the U.S. government's voluntary process for pre-release model testing.

I did say we'd be releasing our models periodically,

Google CEO Sundar Pichai wrote on X.

Google did not give a developer launch date, an API model ID, a context window or a Carbon-specific safety report. It also did not say which organizations are in the Fairwind cohort.

Carbon follows Gemini 4 Argon, which Google first released to cyber defenders on Sept. 30 and has since opened to developers, as AI Briefing News reported. Google's cyber-first approach contrasts with Moonshot AI's, which said this month that it removed cyber training data from Kimi K3.1 Pro to avoid advancing the frontier of hacking capability.