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Google announces Gemini 4 Carbon, limited to cyber defenders at first
Google said Wednesday it is introducing Gemini 4 Carbon, which it called its strongest model, with a staged rollout starting with some cyber defenders rather than a general launch.
- Our desk updated its story
- Google is now reporting this
- New headline Was: “Google announces Gemini 4 Carbon, limited to cyber defenders at first”
- Our desk updated its story
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4 earlier updates
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- New headline Was: “Gemini 4 Carbon”
- Our desk filed its story
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Google said Wednesday it is introducing Gemini 4 Carbon, describing the system as its next frontier model and saying it will first reach a subset of cyber defenders rather than a full product launch1.
The company said Carbon builds on Gemini 4 Argon, which it launched two weeks earlier, and that it is taking part in the U.S. government's voluntary process for pre-release model testing1. Google said it will gradually expand access through its Fairwind Program and continue iterating on guardrails before offering Carbon to developers, businesses and consumers1.
On public leaderboards it cited, Google said Carbon ranks first on version 5.0 of the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index with a score of 591. It also reported 88.2% on SEC-bench Pro for finding vulnerabilities, 54.8% on ExploitGym for exploitation and 71.0% on Collinear's CWE-bench for patching, and said those cybersecurity scores were evaluated without guardrails1.
Google said Carbon is built for long-horizon engineering work and that internal teams have used it for multi-day agentic tasks such as finding and patching bugs in large codebases1. It reported a gain of 89 Elo points to fourth place (1769) on WebDev Arena1.
On internal measures, Google said Carbon more than doubled Argon's success rate at generating secure code1. It said Chrome reported Carbon produced high-quality patches more than 10 times better than another lab's large frontier model, and that Wiz observed Carbon leading on web penetration-testing benchmarks1. Those comparisons were not independently verified in this filing1.
Google said Carbon uses the same multi-layered safety stack as Argon and reported 0.0% successful cheating on Terminal-Bench 4.0, about twice as few unsupported claims as Argon in internal tests, and 0.0% attack success on Gray Swan's Indirect Prompt Injection benchmark, compared with 0.7% it cited for Argon1.
Gemini 4 Carbon will launch at the same introductory prices as Argon, Google said: $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, with cached input tokens at 95% off the input price1. A general availability date was not given1.
