Following the launch of Argon two weeks ago, Google today announced Gemini 4 Carbon as its next frontier model.
There are “significant gains” in coding, agentic tasks, and cybersecurity defense (finding vulnerabilities). Notably, “Carbon ranks #1 on the recently updated v5.0 of Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index at 59.”
Google says this fast release is due to its researchers and models “working hand in hand to advance capabilities faster.”
Based on user feedback following the last launch, Google worked to improve Carbon across “coding, agentic, and scientific tasks, as well as full-stack web development and multimodal understanding.”
- “With improved quality of output and artifacts in web development, Carbon jumps +89 elo points to land at #4 (1769) on WebDev Arena.”
- For cybersecurity:
- “firm lead in SEC-bench Pro (88.2%) for finding vulnerabilities, ExploitGym (54.8%) for exploitation, and CWE-bench (71.0%) for patching.”
- “On internal benchmarks, Carbon drives a strong uplift in generating secure code, and in live coding environments with our own teams it shows reduced misalignment and fabrication rates.”
On the safety front, Google worked to improve alignment and trained Carbon to “respond to complex or high-pressure tasks in the right way.”
- Greater transparency and honesty: In our internal testing, Carbon cuts unsupported claims by approximately 2x over Argon. It puts methodological caveats directly into the deliverable or withholds blocked actions with a clear list of what remains required, rather than fabricating or hedging around missing evidence.
- Improved collaboration with the user in the face of ambiguity: Rather than guessing or forcing a path forward, Carbon retrieves the relevant sources and surfaces discrepancies to the user before acting — as a result, users should observe a much better collaborative experience with Carbon.
- Following through without overstepping: Carbon simultaneously reduced overreach by 26% and under-service by 29% resulting in much more reliable execution of multi-step plans end-to-end while respecting project constraints and staying strictly within scope.
Officially, Gemini 4 Carbon is “coming soon to developers, businesses, and consumers.” The model will first be available to “cyber defenders” this week.
Once available, Google will offer introductory pricing of “$2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, with cached input tokens priced at 95% off input token price.” Afterward, it will cost $4 per 1M input tokens and $20 per 1M output tokens.
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