Google Launches Gemini 4 Argon, Restricts Early Access to Cybersecurity Partners

Google said on Wednesday that it had begun rolling out Gemini 4 Argon, which it calls its most advanced artificial intelligence model, giving initial access only to organizations focused on cybersecurity defense while additional safety evaluations continue.¹⁵⁷

A limited rollout

Google says Fairwind will give trusted cybersecurity defenders the earliest access to Argon, with the model becoming available afterward to subscribers of Google AI Ultra and to customers paying for API access. The company did not provide a timeline for public availability.⁵⁹¹⁰⁸

For its introductory pricing, Google is charging $2 for every million input tokens processed by Argon and $10 for every million tokens it outputs.⁹³⁴

Benchmark claims

Google claims Argon outpaces rival systems built by OpenAI and Anthropic on numerous benchmark tests, citing a DeepSWE v1.1 coding score of 77.9 percent versus 74.2 percent for Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 and 74.1 percent for OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra. Google also reports Argon scoring 68.9 percent on the Vals Index, a benchmark covering finance, legal and professional tasks, compared with 67.0 percent for Opus 5.5.⁴⁶

On Zapier's AutomationBench, Google reports Argon at 51.3 percent against 42.5 percent for Opus 5.5. Anthropic's model still leads on Terminal-Bench 4.0, according to Google's figures, at 66.4 percent versus Argon's 57.4 percent, though Google noted that Artificial Analysis separately measured Opus 5.5 at only 59.6 percent on that test. On the CWE-bench v1 cybersecurity test, Argon matched Astra's score of 68 percent, edging out Opus 5.5's 67 percent.⁴

Internal use and doubts

Google says thousands of its employees already use Argon internally for coding, research and writing. The company reports that Argon-driven memory optimizations have freed more than 300 tebibytes of memory across its data centers without additional hardware purchases, and that Argon agents migrated more than 800,000 lines of code in the Fuchsia OS Zircon kernel. A video decoder optimized by Argon agents is reported to run 2.7 times faster than the previous version written in Rust.⁴⁶

Axios reported that some Google staff found Argon's performance lacking, a claim Google disputed. Bloomberg separately reported internal doubts about the model's benchmark figures, according to Trending Topics.¹⁰⁴

Safety review

Google is participating in the United States government's voluntary process for pre-release access to new AI models, according to multiple outlets. A day before the Argon announcement, Google chief executive Sundar Pichai co-signed a voluntary safety accord with President Trump alongside other major technology companies.⁷⁸²³

Google said it plans to strengthen critical safeguards before a broader public rollout of Argon.⁷⁵