✳ the wire · intel
Gemini 3.5 Pro surfaced on LM Arena for about 50 minutes, then vanished

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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