Image: Google
Google has officially announced Gemini 4 Carbon, which it calls its strongest model yet, with a focus on cybersecurity and long, multi-step tasks. The company introduced the model on October 28 in a post by Koray Kavukcuoglu of Google DeepMind, and Google AI shared the news on X.
Announcing Gemini 4 Carbon, our strongest model with state-of-the-art cybersecurity and long horizon capabilities.
— Google AI (@GoogleAI) October 28, 2026
Carbon represents a step up across most benchmarks, delivering strong frontier performance in autonomous coding and cyber defense.
We’re first making Carbon available to a subset of trusted cyber defenders in our Fairwind program. We’ll expand access as soon as possible.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai also announced the model, calling Carbon a sign of "the pace at which we’re pushing the frontier." He wrote that Google is seeing significant improvements in long-horizon tasks even compared to Argon and has strengthened frontier safeguards.
I did say we'd be releasing our models periodically...introducing Gemini 4 Carbon, our next frontier model.
— Sundar Pichai (@sundarpichai) October 28, 2026
Following Argon's release just two weeks ago, Carbon shows the pace at which we’re pushing the frontier, it ranks #1 on the recently updated v5.0 of @ArtificialAnlys Intelligence Index at 59.
What has changed since the leaks
Carbon first surfaced on October 10, when TechcityAuthority reported that Google employees were testing an internal model by that name, based on Business Insider's reporting. Google had not confirmed it then. A later report on October 21 cited leakers who said an early access program had begun. Carbon is now an official, named Gemini 4 model with published benchmarks and pricing, although most people still cannot use it.
What Carbon is
Google says Carbon builds on Gemini 4 Argon, which launched two weeks earlier. It is designed for hard, long engineering problems, and Google says its teams have seen Carbon run for days on tasks like finding and patching subtle bugs across large codebases. The company also reports gains in coding, agentic and scientific tasks, web development and multimodal understanding.
Carbon ranks first on version 5.0 of the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index with a score of 59, according to Google. In Google's comparison table, that puts it ahead of Claude Opus 5.5 at 58, GPT-6 Astra at 57 and Argon at 50. It does not lead everywhere, as GPT-6 Astra scores higher on FrontierSWE 2 and Claude Opus 5.5 scores higher on OSWorld-2.1.
Image: Google
A cybersecurity focus
Security is Carbon's headline feature. Google reports 88.2% on SEC-bench Pro for finding vulnerabilities, 54.8% on ExploitGym for checking whether flaws can be exploited and 71.0% on CWE-bench for writing fixes. Google notes these were evaluated without guardrails.
Image: Google
Google also says Carbon is more than twice as successful as Argon at generating secure code on internal tests, and that the Chrome team found it more than ten times better than another lab's large frontier model at producing high quality patches.
Safety claims
Google says Carbon reduced successful cheating on Terminal-Bench 4.0 to 0.0% and cut unsupported claims by about half compared with Argon. It reports a 0.0% attack success rate on Gray Swan's indirect prompt injection benchmark, down from 0.7% for Argon. These are company-reported results, and Google's methodology page and safety report carry more detail.
Image: Google
Who can use it, and what it costs
Access is limited for now. Google says it is first giving Carbon to a subset of cyber defenders and will gradually add more trusted partners through its Fairwind Program, which prioritizes governments, critical infrastructure operators and core technology platforms. Google also says it is taking part in the U.S. government's voluntary process for pre-release model testing. Developers, businesses and consumers will get access through Google's products as soon as possible, but no date was given. Pichai said the rollout will be gradual, as it was with Argon, with wider availability coming "soon."
When it does launch, Google says Carbon will use the same introductory price as Argon, $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, with cached input 95% cheaper. After the introductory period, Google lists $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output tokens. There is no public release date for Carbon at the time of this writing.
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