Gemini 4 Carbon is live on the Gemini API at $2 / $10 per 1M tokens until November 30, then $4 / $20

Google made Gemini 4 Carbon generally available on the Gemini API on November 10 as gemini-4-carbon, at an introductory $2 per 1M input tokens and $10 per 1M output tokens through November 30. ArtificialWatch's radar fired at 15:46 UTC. Google announced Carbon on October 28 but until today had opened it only to cyber defenders and trusted partners.

THE PRICE

• Input: $2 per 1M tokens through November 30, then $4 from December 1.
• Output, including thinking tokens: $10 per 1M through November 30, then $20.
• Cached input: $0.10, then $0.20. Caching is implicit only.
• There is no free tier. Batch, Flex and Priority inference are offered.
• That is the same price as Gemini 4 Argon. The $4 / $20 rows that appeared on Google Cloud's SKU list this morning were the list price that starts in December.

THE SPECS

• A unified 1,048,576-token context window shared by input, thinking and output.
• Up to 65,536 output tokens by default, and up to about 1M with Google's long-decode option.
• Text, image, video, audio and PDF in, text out.
• Thinking levels low, medium and high, with medium as the default.
• Tools include code execution, computer use, function calling, structured outputs, URL context, file search and grounding with Google Search and Maps.

WHAT GOOGLE SAYS

Google calls Carbon its strongest reasoning model, built for agentic coding, multimodal knowledge work, scientific reasoning and cybersecurity defense. It says Carbon spends more thinking tokens per turn than Argon to explore and check its work, at the same per-token price, so a task costs more and takes longer. On October 28 Google published its own figures of 88.2% on SEC-bench Pro, 54.8% on ExploitGym and 71.0% on CWE-bench. That day Artificial Analysis put Carbon first on its Intelligence Index at 59.4. Claude Fable 5.2 has since taken first at 65.

WHAT IS NOT CONFIRMED

Screenshots posted by @LuminaBench and @Mr_Salio show Carbon in the Gemini app for Ultra subscribers first, as Argon was at its launch. Google's developer pages do not cover the app. At 16:51 UTC Vertex AI's model docs still do not list Carbon. OpenRouter added google/gemini-4-carbon at $2 / $10 with the full 1,048,576-token context, plus a Batch version at $1 / $5.

WHAT WE DO NOT KNOW

When Carbon reaches Vertex AI and the Gemini app's other plans, and how independent boards score the generally available model.