Gemini 4 Argon: our next era of frontier intelligence
Source
deepmind.google
Date
Key takeaways · AI-distilled
Google lists Argon's introductory price as $2 per million input tokenThe chunk of text a model reads and writes in — roughly three-quarters of a word — and the unit AI usage is billed in.Full definition → and $10 per million output, with cached input 95% off. Access starts with trusted cyber defenders; paid API customers and AI Ultra subscribers come next.
Google raised Argon's output limit to 1M tokens from 64K, so a single trajectory can generate hundreds of thousands of tokens. It reports 77.9% on DeepSWE v1.1, 51.3% on Zapier's AutomationBench and 91.7% on LVBench.
Google says Argon agents replaced 32K lines of SIMD code in a Rust port of the libgav1 video decoder with safe Rust the compiler auto-vectorizes, making it 2.7x faster with identical output. Other agents freed 300+ TiB of fleet memory.
Trusted defenders get Argon without cyber guardrailsThe checks around a model that block bad inputs and outputs — filters, validators, and permission rules the model itself can't override.Full definition →. Google says it ties for first on CWE-bench v1 at 68%, and that Wiz used it to find a critical data-exposure flaw in hospital software that earlier frontier models had missed.
For safety, Google monitors Argon's chain-of-thoughtHaving a model write out intermediate reasoning steps before its answer, which markedly improves performance on hard problems.Full definition → and actions to halt out-of-bounds behavior, and says it kept training-run monitor findings out of training so the model would not learn to evade monitoring.
Terms in this piece · Glossary
token — The chunk of text a model reads and writes in — roughly three-quarters of a word — and the unit AI usage is billed in.
guardrails — The checks around a model that block bad inputs and outputs — filters, validators, and permission rules the model itself can't override.
chain-of-thought — Having a model write out intermediate reasoning steps before its answer, which markedly improves performance on hard problems.
Why it matters
Gemini 4 Argon targets long-horizon coding and cyber work with a 1M token limit, but access is currently limited to trusted defenders in the Fairwind Program. Engineers should plan around the gated rollout before depending on it.
