Google's Gemini 4 Carbon looks like a diamond in the rough

Just two weeks after launching Gemini 4 Argon, Google has announced a better-performing version of the model that it will sell for the same price, at least temporarily.

Koray Kavukcuoglu, SVP at Google DeepMind and chief AI architect at Google, said Gemini 4 Carbon represents the company's strongest model yet, particularly in terms of cybersecurity and long-running tasks.

There's some irony in the name "Carbon", given the Chocolate Factory plans a carbon-dioxide-free future. Given Google's political timidity when it comes to names on maps, Gemini 4 Americium might be more representative of management's worldview. Gemini 4 Silicon is another missed opportunity - the chemical symbol is Si, a bobbleheaded nod to "Super Intelligence."

Priced initially at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, Gemini 4 Carbon sells for the same amount as its predecessor Argon during an indeterminate introductory period. When that period expires, Google will lift prices to $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output tokens.

That's the same as Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5, which Google clearly sees as Carbon's competition.

Last month, Google's ability to compete in the wake of the leadership change at its DeepMind AI subsidiary looked less certain.

But Carbon has posted impressive benchmark scores, taking the lead in SEC-bench Pro, ExploitGym, and CWE-bench, while landing at fourth place on WebDev Arena, behind Opus 5.5, GPT-6.1 Astra, and Sonnet 5.5. Carbon currently ranks second, behind Opus 5.5, in Arena.ai's leaderboard for Best Overall Agent.

Model ratings biz Artificial Analysis says Google's new model tops its newly formulated Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v5 and comes in second to Claude Code Opus 5.5 on its Coding Agent Index.

Kavukcuoglu emphasized Carbon's cybersecurity capabilities, which will be available this week to an unspecified set of cybersecurity defenders and more eventually through the company's Fairwind access program. "On internal benchmarks, Carbon achieves more than 2x uplift in success rate for generating secure code over Argon," he wrote. "As another example, the Chrome team has reported that Carbon performed more than 10x better than another lab's large frontier model when generating high quality patches."

"Gemini 4 Argon and Carbon are now leading at the frontier," said Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet, in a statement [PDF] accompanying Alphabet's Q3 2026 earnings. "Overall, our first-party model APIs are now processing nearly 32 billion tokens per minute, more than four times what we processed a year ago."

While Google may hope to surpass Anthropic and OpenAI in terms of model performance and usage, it's already ahead in revenue. Pointing to the company's strong Q3 earnings, Emarketer principal analyst Nate Elliott in a statement told The Register, "In a sly nod to the way AI-only companies talk about their revenue, Google bragged about its half-trillion dollar run rate - almost ten times more than either OpenAI or Anthropic."

Google will release Carbon this week to select cybersecurity defenders. The company aims to make the AI model more broadly available "as soon as possible." (R)