✳ the wire · intel
Gemini 3.5 Pro surfaced on LM Arena for about 50 minutes, then vanished
An email when every new Google model answers on a public API, about 15 minutes after members, plus every frontier launch · no card
Multiple users caught Gemini 3.5 Pro in LM Arena's blind battles before it was pulled, reportedly visible for around fifty minutes. Early A/B testing has been under way for some time, and the current reported launch target is the first week of August.
A fifty-minute appearance is a stronger signal than it sounds. Arena checkpoints get pulled when a lab decides the comparison is running before it wants it to — which is a scheduling decision, not a capability one, and scheduling decisions are made against a date. This is the same pattern that preceded Gemini 3.6 Flash, which we called two days early off an Arena blind-test checkpoint.
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