Google announces Gemini 4 Argon: $2/$10, #1 on Vals, trusted testers only for now

Google announced Gemini 4 Argon today, its new frontier model. You cannot use it yet: it is rolling out to trusted cyber defenders and testers through Google's Fairwind Program.

THE PRICE

From Google's launch post: Argon "will launch at an introductory price of $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens", with cached input 95% off. That is the same sticker as Claude Sonnet 5.5, and a fifth of what Claude Fable 5.1 and GPT-6 Astra charge.

WHAT GOOGLE SAID

The output limit goes to 1M tokens, up from 64K. Google's own benchmark claims include a state-of-the-art 77.9% on DeepSWE v1.1, and it describes Argon as leading in defensive cybersecurity. Those are Google's figures. Access widens to "paid API customers and Google AI Ultra subscribers" after the testers, with no date. Google says it is taking part in the U.S. government's voluntary pre-release access process.

WHAT IS INDEPENDENT

Vals lists Gemini 4 Argon #1 on the Vals Index at 68.90%, ahead of Claude Sonnet 5.5 (67.04%), Claude Opus 5.5 (66.97%) and Fable 5.1 (65.83%), at $15.68 per test against Sonnet 5.5's $21.34.

Artificial Analysis scores Gemini 4 Argon (High) 53 on its Intelligence Index, #8 of 223 on its board (read at 21:20 UTC).

WHAT WE DO NOT KNOW

The public release date and the API model id. At 20:30 UTC Google's model docs, OpenRouter and models.dev carry no Gemini 4 id.

WHAT IS ARMED

Our Gemini 4 hunt stays live. It fires on the first Gemini 4 id that answers on a public API, in any spelling Google has used, and now on a gemini-argon id too. Polymarket's "Gemini 4.0 released by...?" market resolves only on public access, so today does not settle it: October 31 read 89.5% at 20:25 UTC.