✳ the wire · intel
New on the radar: Gemini 4 Carbon appeared in OpenRouter catalog
An email when every new Google model answers on a public API, about 15 minutes after members, plus every frontier launch · no card
Our hourly sweep found an id that was not there an hour ago.
Catalog id: google/gemini-4-carbon
Listed price: $2.00/$10.00 per 1M
Context window: 1,048,576 tokens
First observed by our sweep: 2026-11-10 16:45 UTC
Source: OpenRouter catalog
This entry is machine-written from what the sweep actually read, and nothing else. A catalog listing is a primary source for exactly one narrow fact — that this id now exists, at this price, with this context window — and it is not evidence of anything beyond that. It does not tell you the model is good, that the listing is intentional, that the weights are open, or that the vendor has announced it. Those questions need a human and an editor's judgement, and this item deliberately does not answer them.
It maps to Gemini 4 Carbon, already on our watchlist — registry note: live — Nov 10 · GA on the Gemini API as gemini-4-carbon (Google's release notes, Nov 10) and in Google AI Studio, paid tier only, no free tier · introductory $2 / $10 per 1M through Nov 30, then $4 / $20 from Dec 1; cached input $0.10, then $0.20, implicit caching only · unified 1,048,576-token context; max output 65,536 by default, up to about 1M with long decode · text, image, video, audio and PDF in, text out · thinking levels low / medium / high, default medium; Google says Carbon spends more thinking tokens per turn than Argon at the same per-token price · Batch, Flex and Priority inference · Google calls it its strongest reasoning model, for agentic coding, multimodal knowledge work, scientific reasoning and cybersecurity defense · Gemini app: screenshots from @LuminaBench and @Mr_Salio show it on Ultra plans first, not confirmed by Google · AW's radar fired at 15:46 UTC · history: announced Oct 28 for cyber defenders and Fairwind partners, alert fired 18:58 UTC; Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v5.0 59.4 at high, first at the time (Oct 28); Google's own figures: SEC-bench Pro 88.2%, ExploitGym 54.8%, CWE-bench 71.0%; billing SKUs appeared on Google Cloud's SKU list Nov 10, read 08:55 UTC.
The radar reads the public model catalogs every hour and the provider APIs every 60 seconds. Signal texts you the minute a launch is confirmed; free alerts follow by email about 15 minutes later.
