Google Launches Gemini 4 Argon, Its New Frontier Model

Google released Gemini 4 Argon on October 13, 2026, calling it its latest frontier model. The announcement came from Koray Kavukcuoglu, SVP at Google DeepMind and Google’s Chief AI Architect.

What Google announced

Google says Argon is built for deep work on complex, real-world tasks in coding, finance, legal, cybersecurity and science. According to the company, it outperforms other frontier models on benchmarks across those domains and ranks #1 on the Vals Index, which measures model performance in sectors like finance, coding, legal and tax work.

Through the Gemini API, Argon has what Google calls an industry-leading 1M unified input-output token limit, along with a new continuation protocol for long tasks.

What it has already done at Google

Google shared several internal examples:

• Chrome. Argon helped the Chrome team separate core webpage handling from a roughly 6 million line legacy folder inside Chromium’s 40 million line codebase, finishing months of work in weeks.
• Gemma. It produced a 2.85x end-to-end inference speedup for Gemma 4 E2B on an A100 via vLLM, taking throughput from about 37,900 to over 108,000 tokens per second with 100% token parity.
• Coding at scale. Google says Argon in Antigravity helped teams increase agentic code submissions by more than 35% while reducing code rollbacks by nearly a third.
• Science. Google also describes work on quantum error correction, a broader class of counterexamples to Grad’s conjecture for fusion stellarators, rare disease genomics and enzyme design.

Safety

Google says Argon has its most comprehensive safety and security stack yet. Shortcut attempts on coding benchmarks dropped to 2%, and on the Gray Swan Indirect Prompt Injection benchmark attack success fell to 0.7% across 15 adaptive attempts.

Pricing and availability

Argon launches at an introductory API price of $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, with cached input tokens 95% off. After the introductory period ends on November 30, 2026, the price becomes $4 and $20.

It is available today:

• for developers on the Gemini API paid tier in AI Studio and Android Studio
• for enterprises in Gemini for business, the API and Google Antigravity
• for Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers in the Gemini app and AI Mode in Search

Google is also offering 10,000 scientists its highest Antigravity usage tier free for six months, subject to selection, and says the rest of the Gemini 4 family is coming.

Why it matters

Argon is Google’s first Gemini 4 model, and it is aimed squarely at long, agentic work rather than quick chat. The intro pricing window means the real test is whether developers and businesses keep paying once it doubles in December.