Google announces Gemini 4 Carbon: its strongest model yet, for cyber defenders first
Gemini 4 Carbon is Google’s strongest model for cybersecurity and long-horizon engineering, according to Google — ranked first on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index at 59 — but most readers cannot use it yet: rollout starts with a subset of cyber defenders while safety guardrails are refined.
What happened
- Google announced Gemini 4 Carbon on 28 October 2026, two weeks after Gemini 4 Argon, describing it as its strongest model with state-of-the-art cybersecurity and long-horizon capabilities.
- Carbon ranks #1 on the recently updated v5.0 Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index at 59, according to Google.
- Google reports state-of-the-art results of 88.2% on SEC-bench Pro (finding vulnerabilities), 54.8% on ExploitGym (exploitation) and 71.0% on CWE-bench (patching). These are vendor-reported benchmark figures.
- On internal benchmarks, Carbon achieves more than twice the success rate of Argon at generating secure code, according to Google, and jumps 89 Elo points to #4 (1768) on WebDev Arena.
- Carbon will launch at the same introductory price as Argon: $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, with cached input tokens at 95% off the input price.
- Rollout is deliberate: Google says it is engaged in the U.S. government’s voluntary pre-release model testing process, and Carbon goes first to a subset of cyber defenders, gradually expanding to trusted partners through the Fairwind Program before reaching developers, businesses and consumers.
What it means
- For most creators and small teams, Carbon changes nothing today — you cannot subscribe to it. Its importance is as a signal of where frontier models are heading: longer-running, multi-step engineering work, with security work as the first use case.
- The pricing, when Carbon does reach developers, matches Argon’s introductory pricing. Until Google publishes general availability, treat any “Gemini 4 Carbon” offer elsewhere with caution and check Google’s own pages.
What we don’t know yet
- Google gives no date for general availability to developers, businesses or consumers. The introductory pricing period and any later price change are also not dated in the announcement.
How we covered this: facts above come only from the sources listed below. Vendor benchmark figures are the vendor’s own, labelled as such. AiTopMix did not independently test the products in this story.
Sources
Checked on 3 November 2026. If a source page has changed since, the source is the final word.
- Google Blog — Introducing Gemini 4 Carbon (28 Oct 2026)
- Google Blog — Google AI news: October 2026 updates (2 Nov 2026)
For the chatbot comparison in the directory, see ChatGPT vs Claude vs Perplexity.