Google has launched Gemini 4 Carbon to the general public following a two-week period of testing with cybersecurity defenders. The company described Carbon as its strongest model to date, designed to compete with frontier systems from OpenAI and Anthropic. While the company's previous model, Argon, remains the primary option for general software engineering and knowledge work, Carbon is intended for complex, multi-step coding and open-ended scientific research.
To support long-horizon tasks, Google is previewing a "swarm" feature on its Antigravity development platform. This feature allows users to transform a single prompt "into a coordinated team of agents." The model is currently rolling out via the Gemini API in Google AI Studio, Gemini for business for paying developers and enterprises, and for Google AI Ultra subscribers in the Gemini app, AI Mode in Search, and Antigravity.
Google is offering Carbon at an introductory price of $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens. This pricing is approximately one-fifth the cost of OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra and one-quarter the cost of Anthropic’s Fable 5.2. Even after introductory pricing ends in late November, the company stated Carbon will remain significantly cheaper than its rivals on a per-token basis.
Benchmarks released by Google indicate the model is among the most powerful on the market across most metrics, trailing only Fable 5.2. The company noted that Carbon pushes the frontier further than its predecessor, Argon, marking a significant move in the competitive landscape of AI research.
