Google announced Gemini 4 Argon, a new frontier model for software engineering, legal and finance work and cyber defence, first released only to trusted cyber defenders.

What Google announced

Koray Kavukcuoglu, Google DeepMind's senior vice president and Google's chief AI architect, wrote the launch post, BetaNews reports. Google aims Argon at complex software engineering, knowledge work such as financial research and legal drafting, and cyber defence.

Google says it trained Argon to find, check and fix serious software flaws on its own. Google staff already use it for daily engineering, including moving large codebases from C and C++ to Rust. It can write up to 1 million tokens of output, up from 64,000 before.

Who could use it first

At launch, only a select group of trusted cyber defenders could use it, through Google's Fairwind Program. They and Google's own teams get a version without the usual cyber guardrails. Google said paid API customers and Google AI Ultra subscribers would come next, but gave no date.

Gemini product lead Tulsee Doshi told CNBC that starting with defenders gives Google more confidence in the rollout, while putting defensive tools in use sooner, TechRepublic reports.

Price and test results

The introductory API price is USD 2 per million input tokens and USD 10 per million output tokens, with cached input 95% cheaper. After the introductory period it rises to USD 4 and USD 20.

Google reports 77.9% on DeepSWE v1.1, a test of long software engineering tasks, and a tie for first place at 68% on CWE-bench v1, which tests fixing security flaws. Reuters reported that in Google's own results Argon trailed rivals on two of four coding benchmarks. Wiz used Argon, through its Scan for Good initiative, to find a critical flaw in healthcare software that earlier models had missed.

Safety steps

Google is releasing it in stages because the model's skills could cause harm if used to attack systems. It listed four safeguards: red-team testing against misuse for cyber, chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear attacks; stronger defences against indirect prompt injection; monitors that watch the model's reasoning and actions and can stop it; and sealed test environments. Google also said it is taking part in the US government's voluntary process for pre-release model access.