Google releases Gemini 4 Argon for Pro, Ultra and developer users

According to Google's AI blog, Argon is globally available today for developers and enterprises via the API in AI Studio and the Gemini platform, for Ultra subscribers in Google Antigravity, and for Ultra and Pro subscribers in the Gemini app and AI Mode in Search. Engadget reported that developers can access it via the Gemini API and Antigravity, while Ultra and Pro subscribers can use it in the Gemini app and AI Mode in Search. The Verge reported that the model is rolling out to Pro and Ultra subscribers in the Gemini app and AI Mode, as well as Ultra subscribers on Antigravity. It is not clear when or whether Argon will reach Plus subscribers or free users.

In the US, Google AI Pro costs $20 per month and Ultra costs at least $100 per month. Argon is launching at an introductory price of $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, with cached input tokens at 95% off, according to Google. Those prices are valid until November 30 and will double afterward. The Verge said the introductory price is about a fifth the cost of OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra and Anthropic's Fable 5 models, and that even after the increase Argon will still be significantly cheaper per token than rival frontier models, though that does not necessarily translate into lower practical costs because models can use different numbers of tokens for the same tasks.

Google says Argon delivers frontier reasoning and improved performance across complex workflows, with less hedging, repetition and cliche than earlier chatbots. The company claims it outperforms rival models including GPT-6 Astra, Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Opus 5.5 across benchmarks covering coding, cybersecurity, science, finance and law. Google also says Argon ranks first on the Vals Index, which measures performance in economic sectors such as finance, coding, legal and tax work. AI benchmarking company Artificial Analysis found that Gemini 4 Argon matches OpenAI GPT-6 Astra's score on its Intelligence Index, a composite of multiple AI benchmarks, at 60% of the cost per task at introductory prices, according to Engadget.

Josh Woodward, VP of Product for Gemini and Google Labs, said that in the Gemini app Argon answers more quickly and with less hedging, repetition and cliche. He said it can return responses while it is still thinking when handling longer tasks that would usually require waiting for results. Google is also making it easier to toggle between chat and tasks in the Gemini app and adding Antigravity's agentic coding interface inside Gemini's macOS app.

Google says it has already used Argon internally to find and patch cybersecurity vulnerabilities, halve the computing power needed for YouTube's comments section, and debug the drone physics simulator for Alphabet's drone delivery company Wing. In its blog, Google described further engineering work: Argon helped the Chrome team separate core webpage handling from a roughly 6 million-line legacy folder within Chromium's 40 million-line codebase, completing an architectural refactor across hundreds of files in weeks rather than months. The company said the change will let live webpages move between tabs, side panels and floating windows without reloading and will eliminate a category of browser crashes. Argon also helped optimize Google's open-source Agent Development Kit, cutting in-memory session preparation time by 40% in long sessions and speeding cold imports by 21%. It made the xTB quantum chemistry package up to 2.3 times faster at predicting molecular structures and 1.8 times faster at conformer search, with changes contributed to the official xTB GitHub repository. Google said Argon achieved a 2.85x end-to-end inference speedup on an A100 via vLLM for Gemma 4 E2B, raising throughput from about 37,900 to more than 108,000 tokens per second with 100% token parity and no quality drop.

Google was expected to launch a 3.5 Pro model but moved on and released Argon instead, Engadget reported. Argon is Google's first major frontier release since Gemini 3 in late 2025. During the intervening months, models from Anthropic and OpenAI left Google trailing, and internal shakeups raised doubts about its ability or desire to compete at the frontier, The Verge reported. Argon arrived a day after Meta announced its own frontier model, Muse Wonder Full. The Verge said the launch suggests Google cannot be counted out of the AI race and that the frontier is not a two-horse race.