Google announces Gemini 4 Carbon, starting with cyber defenders before a wider release
Google DeepMind announced Gemini 4 Carbon, which it calls its strongest model, with a focus on long-running coding work and cybersecurity defense; access starts with a small group of cyber defenders, and Google says developers, businesses and consumers will get it later at the same introductory price as Gemini 4 Argon.
What happened
- Google announced Gemini 4 Carbon on October 28, 2026, two weeks after launching Gemini 4 Argon.
- Google says Carbon ranks first on version 5.0 of the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index with a score of 59, and reports scores of 88.2% on SEC-bench Pro, 54.8% on ExploitGym and 71.0% on CWE-bench for finding, validating and patching vulnerabilities.
- Access starts this week with a subset of cyber defenders and expands to trusted partners through Google's Fairwind Program; Google says it is taking part in the U.S. government's voluntary pre-release model testing.
- Google says Carbon will launch to developers at Argon's introductory price of $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, rising to $4 and $20 after the introductory period.
- Google reports Carbon cut unsupported claims by about half compared with Argon in internal testing and resisted every attack in Gray Swan's indirect prompt-injection benchmark.
Why it matters: Most businesses can't use Carbon yet, but it signals the next upgrade coming to Gemini and to developer tools built on it. Its focus on finding and fixing security flaws could matter for anyone who relies on AI to write or review code.
Sources
- Google: Gemini 4 Carbon, our next frontier model blog.google
Checked October 29, 2026 against the sources above. Claims about performance or benchmarks are the company's own unless stated otherwise.