Google Unveils Gemini 4 Carbon With Strong Benchmarks and a Temporary Lower Price

A new model and pricing

Google announced Gemini 4 Carbon as an upgraded version of Gemini 4 Argon, launched two weeks earlier. The company plans to charge $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens during an introductory period of unspecified length.

After that period, prices are set to rise to $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output tokens. Those later rates match the pricing of Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5, which Google appears to view as a competitor.

Carbon’s benchmark performance

Carbon led in SEC-bench Pro, ExploitGym and CWE-bench, according to the reported results. It placed fourth on WebDev Arena, behind Opus 5.5, GPT-6.1 Astra and Sonnet 5.5. On Arena.ai’s Best Overall Agent leaderboard, Carbon currently ranks second behind Opus 5.5. The reported rankings show strong results in some evaluations, while placing it below competing models in others.

Cybersecurity access plans

Google executive Koray Kavukcuoglu highlighted Carbon’s cybersecurity capabilities. The model is expected to become available this week to an unspecified group of cybersecurity defenders, with further access planned through Google’s Fairwind program.

Google’s financial position

Google is seeking to compete with Anthropic and OpenAI on model performance and usage, while already generating more revenue, the report said. Emarketer principal analyst Nate Elliott pointed to Google’s third-quarter earnings and its half-trillion-dollar run rate.