Google finally releases Gemini 4 Argon

After months of trailing its rivals, Google says Argon competes with the industry’s best.

Robert Hart

Oct 13, 2026, 4:00 PM UTC

Image: The Verge

Robert Hart

is a London-based reporter at

The Verge

covering all things AI and a Senior Tarbell Fellow. Previously, he wrote about health, science and tech for

Forbes

After months sitting on the sidelines of the frontier AI race, Google has finally launched its long-awaited Gemini 4 Argon model, claiming it can compete with the best the industry has to offer.

GooglesaysArgon delivers “frontier reasoning and improved performance across complex workflows,” while cutting down on hedging, repetition, and the cliches that continue to plague AI chatbots. The companyclaimsArgon outperforms rival models like GPT-6 Astra, Claude Fable 5.1, and Claude Opus 5.5 across a range of benchmarks, including coding, cybersecurity, science, finance, and law.

Google says it’s already putting Argon to use internally, such as finding and patching cybersecurity vulnerabilities, halving the computing power needed to power YouTube’s comments section, and debugging the drone physics simulator for Alphabet’s drone delivery company Wing.

The model is rolling out today to Google’s higher-tier Pro and Ultra subscribers in the Gemini app and AI mode in Search, as well to Ultra subscribers on its agentic development platform Antigravity. It is not clear when — or if — Argon will be available to Plus subscribers or free users.

Google is pricing Argon very competitively. The model is launching with an introductory price of $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, around afifth the costof OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra and Anthropic’s Fable 5 models. Even after those costs double at the end November — when the introductory period finishes — Argon will still be significantly cheaper than its frontier rivals on a per-token basis, though this doesn’t necessarily translate to lower costs in practice, as models can use different numbers of tokens for the same tasks.

The launch fills in some of the blanks left behind from when Googlefirst teased Argona few weeks ago. In line with other recent frontier model releases, the public rolloutfollows a limited releaseto a select set of “trusted cyber defenders” to be tested for potential risks.

Argon is Google’s first major frontier release since Gemini 3 in late 2025. In the intervening months, impressive models from Anthropic and OpenAI have seen Google trail far behind its rivals. Seismicinternal shakeupsraised further doubts about the company’s ability —or desire— to reclaim its position and compete at the frontier of AI.

But Argon’s arrival suggests we can’t count Google out of the AI race just yet. Landing just a day after Metaannounced its own frontier model, Muse Wonder Full, Argon is a reminder of how quickly the balance of power can shift in AI, and that the frontier is far from a two-horse race.

Follow topics and authors

from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.