Google announces Gemini 4 Carbon, starting with cyber defenders

Google announced Gemini 4 Carbon on 28 October 2026, two weeks after Gemini 4 Argon, and calls it its strongest model, aimed at long-horizon engineering work and cybersecurity defense. Google says Carbon ranks first on version 5.0 of the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index with a score of 59 and reports 88.2% on SEC-bench Pro for finding vulnerabilities, 54.8% on ExploitGym for exploitation and 71.0% on CWE-bench for patching. It also gained 89 Elo points to reach fourth place (1768) on WebDev Arena.

Access starts small. From the week of the announcement a subset of cyber defenders gets the model, and Google will gradually add more trusted partners through its Fairwind Program while it takes part in the US government's voluntary pre-release testing. Developers, businesses and consumers are to get Carbon later, with no date given.

The price is already set: an introductory $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, the same as Argon, with cached input 95% cheaper. After the introductory period it becomes $4 and $20. On safety, Google reports a 0.0% attack success rate on Gray Swan's indirect prompt injection benchmark and says high-severity misalignment alerts in internal coding work fell by almost 80%.