Google announces Gemini 4 Carbon but holds back its public release

Google's new frontier model improves on Gemini 4 Argon, with gains in coding, agentic tasks and cybersecurity, according to Google. It will first go through US government testing before a wider release, with no date given.

Google has unveiled Gemini 4 Carbon, an upgrade to the Gemini 4 Argon model it released two weeks earlier. Carbon is not yet available to the public.

Google said Carbon is twice as likely as Argon to write code free of vulnerabilities and that it resisted every prompt-injection attempt in the Grey Swan evaluation. In Google's own benchmarks, Carbon beats rival models such as GPT-6 Astra and Claude Opus 5.5 in almost every test. API pricing will start at a discounted $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, then double, though Google has not said when.

Google said the model's strength in agentic coding and cybersecurity calls for a cautious rollout. It is working within the US government's voluntary testing framework and plans to release Carbon through its Fairwinds cyber defence programme once that is done.

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