Google announces Gemini 4 Carbon, first on Artificial Analysis at 59, but cyber defenders get it first

Google announced Gemini 4 Carbon on October 28, two weeks after Gemini 4 Argon, and calls it its strongest model. It is not public yet. Access starts this week for a subset of cyber defenders, then widens to trusted partners through Google's Fairwind Program, and Google says developers, businesses and consumers get it 'as soon as possible'. As of 18:05 UTC there is no Carbon model id in the Gemini API changelog, on OpenRouter or on models.dev.

THE SCORE

Artificial Analysis lists Carbon first on its Intelligence Index v5.0 at 59.4 at high effort, ahead of Claude Opus 5.5 at 58.4 and GPT-6 Astra at 56.9, both at max. Artificial Analysis marks Carbon as a model with no publicly available API. The lead over Opus 5.5 is one point.

THE PRICE

Google says Carbon launches at Argon's introductory price: $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output, with cached input 95% off. After the introductory period it rises to $4 and $20, the same list price as Claude Opus 5.5.

GOOGLE'S OWN FIGURES

Google reports 88.2% on SEC-bench Pro for finding vulnerabilities, 54.8% on ExploitGym for exploitation and 71.0% on Collinear's CWE-bench for patching. It says Carbon gained 89 Elo points over Argon to reach fourth on WebDev Arena at 1769, cut successful cheating on Terminal-Bench 4.0 to 0.0%, and had a 0.0% attack success rate on Gray Swan's indirect prompt injection benchmark. These are Google's numbers, not independent results.

WHAT WE DO NOT KNOW

When Carbon reaches the Gemini API, AI Studio or the Gemini app, what its model id will be, and how long the introductory price lasts. Argon took 13 days from announcement to general availability (September 30 to October 13). ArtificialWatch has armed a hunt for Carbon and will alert when it answers on a public API.