Google's Argon launches at a fifth of frontier rivals' price — SkimNews
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- Google launched Gemini 4 Argon, its first major frontier model since Gemini 3 in late 2025, claiming it outperforms GPT-6 Astra, Claude Fable 5.1, and Claude Opus 5.5 across coding, cybersecurity, science, finance, and law benchmarks.
- Argon is rolling out to Pro and Ultra subscribers in the Gemini app, AI mode in Search, and Ultra subscribers on Antigravity, with no timeline yet for Plus or free users.
- Google priced Argon at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens during an introductory period — roughly a fifth the cost of GPT-6 Astra and Anthropic's Fable 5, with prices set to double at the end of November.
- Argon is already being used internally to find and patch cybersecurity vulnerabilities, halve the computing power behind YouTube's comments section, and debug the drone physics simulator for Alphabet's Wing delivery unit.
- Argon lands a day after Meta announced its own frontier model, Muse Wonder Full, underscoring how rapidly the AI frontier balance is shifting.
Why it matters: Argon is Google's first major frontier release since Gemini 3 in late 2025, and at $2/$10 per million tokens it's priced at roughly a fifth of GPT-6 Astra and Fable 5. With Meta's Muse Wonder Full arriving one day earlier, what the source calls a 'two-horse race' between OpenAI and Anthropic now has Google back as a direct pricing competitor.
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