Google unveils Gemini 4 Argon to a vetted group

What happened: Google unveiled Gemini 4 Argon. For now it is available only to a vetted group of cybersecurity defenders. Introductory pricing is $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens. Google appears to have tabled Gemini 3.5 Pro to focus on Argon, and CEO Sundar Pichai retweeted preliminary benchmarks where Argon nearly beat everyone across the board.
The claim: Google calls it its most capable model yet and says it is taking part in the government's voluntary pre-release review.
Austin's take: Austin calls the pricing very competitive and sees Google back in the intelligence race after trailing OpenAI, Anthropic and others. He welcomes more competition, notes benchmarks are hard to interpret, and guesses Google will chase the efficiency and consumer play across Gmail, Workspace, Search, YouTube and mobile, alongside its cloud business.
Why it matters: A strong, cheap model from a company with Google's reach could put more capable AI into products many people already use daily.
What to do: If you build on AI models, keep an eye on Argon's wider availability and pricing. Take preliminary benchmarks as a hint, not proof.
Not confirmed yet: Benchmarks are preliminary and only the ones Google chose to release. Austin's figures on Google's share of Norway's electricity and world compute were secondhand.

The Loop