Google announces Gemini 4 Carbon with cybersecurity and long-horizon capabilities

What happened

Google announces Gemini 4 Carbon as its strongest model, with state-of-the-art cybersecurity and long-horizon capabilities. Google says Carbon improves across most benchmarks, delivering strong frontier performance in autonomous coding and cyber defense. Carbon is initially available to a subset of trusted cyber defenders in Google’s Fairwind program, with access to expand as soon as possible.

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Reported by 7 sources

The story so far

Google DeepMind announced Gemini 4 Carbon with initial access limited to selected cyber defenders, while Artificial Analysis ranked it first on its Intelligence Index v5 with a score of 59; the model is not yet publicly available. Google said access would expand through its Fairwind Program to additional trusted partners as it gathers feedback and refines guardrails before broader availability for developers, businesses, and consumers. Artificial Analysis reported that Carbon led four of nine evaluations, but its coding-agent score using Antigravity CLI was 59, behind Claude Opus 5.5 at 62. Google reported cybersecurity scores of 88.2% on SEC-bench Pro, 54.8% on ExploitGym, and 71.0% on CWE-bench, all measured without guardrails. Sundar Pichai said Carbon significantly improves on Argon in long-horizon tasks and has strengthened frontier safeguards. The restricted rollout drew criticism from Nathan Lambert, who objected to Google announcing benchmark scores for a model he could not publicly use. He later softened his criticism, saying he felt bad about the rant after hearing about difficulties getting a frontier model released through unofficial channels.