Google announced Gemini 4 Carbon and reported it ranked first on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index

On October 28, 2026, Google announced Gemini 4 Carbon, its next frontier model, two weeks after Gemini 4 Argon launched, with an introductory price of $2 per 1M input tokens and $10 per 1M output tokens.

Archive entry: this covers an event from October 28, 2026, and we published it on November 8, 2026. The details come from sources dated at the time and may have changed since.

On October 28, 2026, Google announced Gemini 4 Carbon, its next frontier model, two weeks after Gemini 4 Argon launched. Google reported that Carbon ranked #1 on version 5.0 of the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index with a score of 59. The announcement is in the Google blog post introducing Gemini 4 Carbon.

What changed

Carbon gained 89 Elo points on WebDev Arena, reaching #4 with 1768.
On cyber benchmarks it scored 88.2% on SEC-bench Pro, 54.8% on ExploitGym and 71.0% on Collinear's CWE-bench.
On internal benchmarks it delivered more than 2x higher success than Argon at generating secure code, and the Chrome team reported it performed more than 10x better than another lab's large frontier model at generating high-quality patches.
On Terminal-Bench 4.0, successful cheating fell to 0.0% and cheating attempts to 0.4%, and high-severity misalignment alerts in internal live coding environments dropped by almost 80%.
Internal testing showed about 2x fewer unsupported claims than Argon, 26% less overreach and 29% less under-service.
Attack success on Gray Swan's Indirect Prompt Injection benchmark was 0.0%, compared with 0.7% for Argon.

What it meant for people building with AI

Google announced a second Gemini 4 frontier model two weeks after Argon, with large claimed gains in agent safety and cyber capability. It also said Carbon had run for days on complex multi-step engineering tasks. The figures were Google's own reporting.

Availability and pricing

Starting the week of October 28, 2026, Carbon went to a subset of cyber defenders while Google took part in the US government's voluntary pre-release testing process. The introductory price matched Argon's: $2 per 1M input tokens and $10 per 1M output tokens, with cached input at 95% off. After the introductory period, $4 per 1M input and $20 per 1M output applied.

Sources

Gemini 4 Carbon: our next frontier model (Google (The Keyword), October 28, 2026, official)

Written with AI assistance, strictly from the sources listed above. Before it went live, automated checks verified its dates, sources and every language edition.