Google releases Gemini 4 Carbon AI model to the public

Google has started rolling out its latest AI model, Gemini 4 Carbon, to the general public. The model was first released about two weeks earlier, in late October, to a select group of cybersecurity defenders.

Google says Carbon is its strongest model yet and that it pushes the frontier further than Argon, the other frontier model it launched last month. The company says Argon will likely remain "the ideal choice for the majority of software engineering and knowledge work", while Carbon is "built for tasks that test the limits of a model's intelligence".

Carbon is available through the Gemini API in Google AI Studio and Gemini for business to all paying developers and enterprises. Google AI Ultra subscribers, who pay $100 a month, get access in the Gemini app, AI Mode in Search and Antigravity. It is not clear when or if the model will reach lower-tier subscribers or free users, The Verge reported.

Google is also previewing a swarm feature on Antigravity, its agentic development platform. According to Google, it turns a single prompt "into a coordinated team of agents".

Carbon launches at an introductory price of $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens. The introductory prices are set to double at the end of November. The Verge reported that this is around a fifth of the cost of OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra and a quarter of the cost of Anthropic's Fable 5.2, which launched the day before.

Benchmarks cited by Google suggest Carbon is among the most powerful models on most metrics, behind Fable 5.2, according to The Verge.

Engadget reported that Google says Carbon helped its first users uncover zero-day vulnerabilities in a short span of time, and has made advances in protein structure prediction. Google is giving 10,000 scientists free access for six months for research, and thousands have already been onboarded.