Google releases Gemini 4 Argon with temporary half-price API access

What happened

Google is rolling out Gemini 4 Argon globally to developers, enterprises, and paid subscribers, emphasizing coding, professional knowledge work, multimodal understanding, and sustained task execution. API pricing is $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens through November 30, rising to $4 and $20 on December 1. Google reports that Argon worked unattended for 11 hours on ADK optimizations, with engineers merging two changes; Ethan Mollick described improvements but noted remaining weaknesses in complex multi-agent tasks.

The story so far

Google launched Gemini 4 Argon globally through paid developer services and subscriptions, with access expanding to Antigravity Pro users, Cursor and Perplexity. Sundar Pichai announced availability through the paid Gemini API and Gemini platform, for Pro and Ultra subscribers in the Gemini app and Search, and for Ultra subscribers in Antigravity. Baoyu reported that Antigravity added paid Pro subscribers through its desktop app, CLI and IDE extensions, with a separate weekly quota; that expansion excludes Antigravity IDE, Pro trials, free users and Plus subscribers. Perplexity announced access for Pro and Max subscribers, while CEO Aravind Srinivas said all Perplexity users could access Argon in fast search and Computer agent modes. API pricing is $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens through November 30, rising to $4 and $20 on December 1. Artificial Analysis found that Argon matched GPT-6 Astra on its Intelligence Index at 60% of Astra’s cost per task under introductory pricing. Epoch AI scored Argon at 165, tied with Fable 5.1 but behind Astra at 166 and Opus 5.5 at 167. The Decoder reported ARC-AGI-3 scores of 97.5% with the Provider Adapter Harness and 49.8% at low reasoning with the Standard Harness, where API problems prevented completion of all games. Google’s Gemini App account also said Argon can use Canvas to turn dense PDFs into interactive, animated web apps.

Keep reading

Trending now

1. 1Meta Releases Muse Spark Open With Mac and Cloud Support, Topping US Open-Weight Index
2. 3OpenAI Updates GPT-6 Astra Pro in ChatGPT With Parallel Agents and Faster Responses
3. 4Meta’s New Business Terms Raise Dispute Over Website Crawling and AI Training Rights
4. 5Reflection Releases Beam Open Weights Model With Launch-Day vLLM Support