Google Launches Gemini 4 Carbon, Tops Cyber Benchmarks — SkimNews
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- Gemini 4 Carbon was released Wednesday as Google's latest frontier model, with the company claiming "significant gains" in coding, agentic tasks and cybersecurity over Argon, which shipped earlier this month.
- Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index (v5.0) places Carbon in the number-one position, with Claude Opus 5.5 and GPT-6 Astra trailing behind on the benchmark.
- SEC-bench Pro — which measures a model's ability to discover real-world bugs — ranks Carbon first, as does ExploitGym, which tests turning a vulnerability into exploits.
- Fairwind Program partners: Carbon is restricted to a select group of cybersecurity defense companies today, with access set to expand to other program partners.
- Google internal teams report Carbon running for days, persisting through dead ends on complex, multi-step engineering tasks while resisting prompt injection, avoiding shortcuts and collaborating with users.
- Argon remains the comparison point: Google says Carbon cuts unsupported claims by two times versus Argon, and was built for greater transparency and honesty.
- Gemini 4 Carbon launches at the same competitive introductory price as Argon — $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens.
Why it matters: For cyberdefense vendors in the Fairwind Program, Carbon arrives as a restricted capability rather than a broadly purchasable product: Google's benchmark-leading model, priced at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, is limited to a select group of security companies, with wider partner access to follow.
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