Google has released Gemini 4 Carbon, its newest frontier model, but only to a small group of cybersecurity defenders for now. Developers, businesses and ordinary users will have to wait; Google says broader access is “coming soon” and has not given a date.
Carbon arrives roughly two weeks after Gemini 4 Argon, the model that reached everyday users earlier this month. Google is pitching the new one at long, multi-step coding jobs and at security work, where it says the gains are largest.
A score of 59 and a security focus
In its launch post, Google says Carbon puts Carbon at number one on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index (v5.0) with 59 points. On WebDev Arena it sits fourth at 1768 Elo, up 89 points. Koray Kavukcuoglu, senior vice president at Google DeepMind, calls it the company’s “strongest model with state-of-the-art cybersecurity and long horizon capabilities”.
| Security benchmark | What it tests | Carbon |
|---|---|---|
| SEC-bench Pro | Finding vulnerabilities | 88.2% |
| ExploitGym | Exploiting them | 54.8% |
| CWE-bench | Patching them | 71.0% |
Google says those runs were external and done without guardrails. Internally, it reports more than double Argon’s success rate at writing secure code, and says the Chrome team found Carbon produced over 10 times more high-quality patches than another lab’s large model. These are Google’s own figures, not independent tests.
Fewer shortcuts, and a rollout under review
Google also publishes behaviour figures. Carbon did not cheat on the Terminal-Bench 4.0 coding test, and the Gray Swan prompt-injection attacks never got through (Argon was hit 0.7% of the time). Google says its own coding teams saw serious misalignment flags fall by nearly 80%. The full detail sits in a separate safety report.
This week’s rollout covers a limited set of defenders, and Google plans to add trusted partners gradually through its Fairwind program. The company is also putting the model through the US government’s voluntary testing before release.
Pricing once it opens up
Developers will pay an introductory $2 for every million tokens they send in and $10 for every million they get back, the same as Argon’s launch rates, and cached input costs 95% less. Once the introductory period ends, those rates double to $4 and $20. We covered the company’s other recent model work in our Genie 4 report. Google has not said whether or when Carbon will reach Gemini app users, so we will update this post when it does.
