Google has released its new flagship AI model, Gemini 4 Argon, to developers and businesses worldwide, seeking to regain ground against rivals OpenAI and Anthropic after months of delays and a leadership shake-up at its DeepMind lab.
The model excels at “deep work” on complex, multi-step tasks in coding, finance, law, cybersecurity and science, Google said.
Access through its application programming interface (API), which developers use to build the model into their own software, costs from US$2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens. Tokens are the chunks of text that AI models process. That introductory pricing runs until 30 November, after which rates double to $4 and $20, according to Google.
The release follows a rocky stretch in Google’s AI efforts. The company announced in September that it no longer planned to release Gemini 3.5 Pro, which CEO Sundar Pichai had said would arrive in June. It also overhauled DeepMind after co-founder Demis Hassabis stepped aside as CEO in August and several leaders of the Gemini model team left the company.
Argon is available to paying customers through Google’s AI application-building tools. Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers can use it through the Gemini app and AI Mode in Search, while access through the Antigravity coding tool is limited to Ultra subscribers.
Google’s own engineering teams using Argon in Antigravity increased agentic code submissions – code written and submitted by AI agents – by more than 35%, while cutting code rollbacks, or changes that had to be reversed, by nearly a third, the company said.
Fairwind programme
Customers testing the model early include Deloitte, LexisNexis, Ambience Healthcare and Isomorphic Labs, parent Alphabet’s drug-discovery company.
Google also said it would open its Fairwind programme to hundreds more partners. The programme gives vetted cybersecurity defenders a version of Argon without its cyber guardrails. In September, the company said it was providing the model to select cybersecurity partners.
Separately, Google will offer 10 000 scientists six months of free access to Antigravity’s highest usage tier. — Kenrick Cai and Prathik Jayaprakash, (c) 2026 Reuters, with additional reporting (c) 2026 NewsCentral Media
