Google announced Gemini 4 Carbon on October 28, 2026, describing it as its next frontier model and its strongest, with state-of-the-art cybersecurity and long-horizon capabilities. The announcement page carries a date without a time of day. Read the announcement.
Reported results
- Ranks first on the updated Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v5.0 at 59.
- Cybersecurity defense (evaluated without guardrails): 88.2% on SEC-bench Pro for finding vulnerabilities, 54.8% on ExploitGym for exploitation and 71.0% on CWE-bench for patching.
- Web development: +89 Elo to fourth place (1768) on WebDev Arena.
- Internal claims include more than 2x uplift over Argon in generating secure code, and a Chrome team report of more than 10x better high-quality patch generation than another lab's large frontier model; Wiz reports Carbon leading its web penetration-testing benchmarks.
These are vendor-reported figures. Google says internal teams have seen Carbon persist for days on long-horizon engineering tasks such as root-causing subtle bugs across large codebases.
A deliberate rollout
Unlike Argon's immediate global availability two weeks earlier, Google is taking a staged approach: it is engaged in the U.S. government's voluntary pre-release model testing process, and starting this week Carbon goes to a subset of cyber defenders, then gradually to additional trusted partners through the Fairwind Program. General availability to developers, businesses and consumers via product surfaces is promised "as soon as possible" after guardrail iteration.
Pricing
Carbon launches at the same introductory price as Argon: $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, with cached input at 95% off; the footnote structure matches Argon's introductory-period terms.
For Argon's launch and global availability, see our September roundup and the Gemini profile; benchmark caveats are explained in our verification guide.
