Google announces Gemini 4 Carbon, its latest frontier AI model that you can't use

What happened

Google announced Gemini 4 Carbon two weeks after rolling out Gemini 4 Argon, claiming improvements in coding, agentic tasks, scientific analysis, and cybersecurity, with access pending a staged release. Google says Carbon is twice as likely as Argon to generate vulnerability-free code and gained 89 points on WebDev Arena, reaching number four. Ars Technica notes that its reported benchmark leads over competing frontier models are generally only a few points.

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Reported by 11 sources

The story so far

Google DeepMind announced Gemini 4 Carbon, which ranks first on Artificial Analysis’s Intelligence Index v5.0 at 59, with access currently limited to selected cybersecurity defense companies, according to The Verge. Google said it would expand access through its Fairwind Program before making Carbon available to developers, businesses, and consumers after gathering feedback and adjusting safety guardrails. 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. Google also said Carbon was twice as likely as Argon to generate vulnerability-free code and halved unsupported claims. Ars Technica noted that Carbon’s reported benchmark leads over competing frontier models were generally only a few points. Google set introductory pricing at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens. Artificial Analysis described this as a 50% launch discount. The restricted rollout drew criticism from Nathan Lambert, who objected to announcing scores for a model he could not publicly use. He later softened his criticism, citing difficulties he had heard about in getting a frontier model released.