Google's Gemini 4 Carbon goes to cyber defenders first, and everyone else has to wait

Google has a new top model, and the headline isn't chat or images. Gemini 4 Carbon, announced on the Google blog by DeepMind's Koray Kavukcuoglu, is pitched as its strongest model yet for cybersecurity work and long, multi-step coding jobs. It lands only two weeks after Gemini 4 Argon.

Why most people can't use it yet

This is the part I find most interesting. Carbon isn't going straight into the Gemini app or the developer API. Google says it starts with a small group of cyber defenders this week, then widens access to trusted partners through a program it calls Fairwind, while it keeps tuning guardrails. Developers, businesses and regular users come "as soon as possible", with no date attached. Google also says it is taking part in the U.S. government's voluntary pre-release testing process.

That's a notable shift in tone. A model that is very good at finding and exploiting vulnerabilities is useful to defenders, but it's just as interesting to attackers, so the company is choosing who gets it first.

The numbers Google is leaning on

• 88.2% on SEC-bench Pro, a benchmark for finding real vulnerabilities
• 54.8% on ExploitGym, which tests whether a flaw can actually be exploited
• 71.0% on CWE-bench for writing working patches
• First place, with a score of 59, on version 5.0 of the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, according to Google

Google also claims Carbon can keep working on hard engineering tasks for days, makes roughly half as many unsupported claims as Argon, and resisted every prompt-injection attempt in one external test. Those are the company's own figures, so I'd treat them as a starting point until outside testers get access.

Pricing

For the introductory period, Carbon costs the same as Argon: $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens. After that it rises to $4 and $20.

For anyone who builds fan sites, tools or games on the side, the takeaway is simple: Carbon is coming, but not this week. You can read Google's full announcement on the Google blog.