Gemini 4 Carbon is here, but you can’t use it yet
Google unveiled Gemini 4 Carbon on 28 October with state-of-the-art cybersecurity scores, including 54.8% on ExploitGym. Access starts with a vetted group of cyber defenders and widens slowly. Developers and consumers have no date.
Google has a new top model and almost nobody is allowed to touch it. Gemini 4 Carbon, announced on Wednesday by Google DeepMind’s Koray Kavukcuoglu, is pitched as the company’s strongest yet, especially at cybersecurity and long, multi-step tasks. It comes just two weeks after Gemini 4 Argon.
The reason for the locked door is in Google’s own numbers. On SEC-bench Pro, which tests whether a model can find security holes in real software, Carbon scored 88.2%. On ExploitGym, which tests whether it can then exploit them, it hit 54.8%, a new record. On CWE-bench it patched 71% of vulnerabilities. A model that good at finding and using flaws is gold for defenders and a problem in the wrong hands.
Who gets it
For now, a hand-picked set of cyber defenders. Access will then widen gradually to other trusted partners through what Google calls the Fairwind Program. Developers, businesses and the general public wait, with no date, while the company gathers feedback and tightens its guardrails. Google also says it put the model through the US government’s voluntary pre-release testing.
Those cyber scores were measured with the guardrails switched off. With them on, Google reports a 0% success rate for prompt-injection attacks on the Gray Swan benchmark, down from 0.7% for Argon.
What it will cost
When it does open up, introductory pricing matches Argon at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, rising to $4 and $20 afterwards. On the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, which ranks models across labs, Carbon sits first with a score of 59.
It fits the staged-release pattern the big labs have been drifting towards since the heads of three of them agreed the industry should slow down. For most people, the Gemini on their phone is still Argon.
By Oliver Grant
Image: Google
