Gemini 4 Carbon: Access, Price and How It Compares

Google DeepMind has announced Gemini 4 Carbon, its most powerful model so far, only about two weeks after opening Gemini 4 Argon to paying subscribers and developers. Google says Carbon takes first place on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, ahead of Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 and OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra. Those are Google's claims, and independent testing is still to come.

Quick summary

• Access: limited to selected cyberdefense organisations, then other trusted partners via the Fairwind program
• No public release date has been given
• Launch price: $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, the same as Argon
• Later price: $4 input and $20 output, after an unspecified launch period
• Cached input tokens get a 95% discount

What is Gemini 4 Carbon built for?

Google positions Carbon for long agentic workflows: chains of actions the model carries out itself on multi-step engineering problems. The company says it has seen the model work on one task for several days and keep going after dead ends. It also reports gains in full-stack web development, multimodal understanding and scientific tasks.

Why is access limited to cyber defenders?

Google says Carbon now covers vulnerability detection, validation that a flaw can really be exploited, and remediation with code that fixes the root cause. A tool that can confirm a flaw is exploitable could also be misused, which is why Google follows the staged approach it used for Argon. It also takes part in the voluntary pre-release testing framework proposed by the US government.

Is Carbon safer than Argon?

Carbon keeps Argon's protections, including real-time detection of malicious use and monitoring of its chain of thought. Google's internal tests show roughly half as many unsupported claims as Argon, and the model flags missing information instead of guessing. On the Gray Swan indirect prompt injection benchmark, Google says none of the tested attacks succeeded. Treat these as vendor-reported numbers.

How much does Gemini 4 Carbon cost?

Prices are in US dollars and no Indian pricing has been announced. Ordinary users cannot buy access yet.

Can you use it in India?

Not at the moment. Google has not said when Carbon will reach developers, businesses or the Gemini app. Argon is the model to look at if you want something available now, since it reached paying subscribers and developers first. Watch our AI coverage and the hardware news that shapes AI capacity for updates.

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