Google launches AI model Gemini 4 Argon: Here’s how it stacks up against GPT-6 Astra and Claude Fable 5.1

Google on Wednesday announced Gemini 4 Argon, a new AI model built to handle a variety of tasks such as coding, research, and writing.

Gemini Argon 4 can work with complex workflows across real-world software engineering, enterprise knowledge work such as in the legal and finance functions, and cybersecurity defence, Google said in a blogpost.

For now, Argon is only being rolled out to a select group of Google's cyber partners through its Fairwind Program, a security initiative that gives high-priority entities such as governments, healthcare providers, and telecoms early access to advanced models, helping them build stronger defences ahead of new threats.


What does Gemini 4 Argon do

Trained specifically for defensive cyber work, Google says the model can "autonomously find, validate, and patch critical software vulnerabilities."

Teams at Google use Argon extensively for coding, engineering, and daily work, Sundar Pichai, Google's CEO, said in a social media post. Argon can also parse visuals, including the contents of long videos and charts.


Google also stated that Wiz, a cloud-native cybersecurity platform, is already using Argon for cybersecurity defence through its Scan for Good initiative, a program dedicated to protecting critical public infrastructure and remedying vulnerabilities.

How Gemini 4 Argon stacks up against competitors

Google states that Gemini 4 Argon outperforms GPT-6 Astra and Claude Fable 5.1 in 12 out of 18 disclosed benchmarks, targeting complex workflows, law, finance, and software engineering. It beat a quantum optimization baseline by 40% in minutes and freed over 300 TiB of data centre memory, the company said.

For libgav1, Google's open source software for decoding video, Argon agents took an existing Rust port and replaced 32,000 lines of SIMD code, producing a memory-safe decoder 2.7x faster than the original Rust port.

Argon is the leading model on the Vals Index, which measures economic impact across finance, coding, legal, and tax work, with every sector weighted by its contribution to the US GDP, Google states.

AI concerns

The launch comes as top AI labs rush to release powerful models, while also flagging the existential risks the technology carries. Not long ago, OpenAI released Astra, hailing it as its best model yet. Earlier this year, Anthropic's Fable was also released with similar aspirations.

Also read: OpenAI scraps planned October launch of GPT-6.1 Astra over safety concerns

Google has recently enjoyed success with Gemini. The company announced that its app had over a billion users per month.

Gemini 4 Argon pricing

"We're going to make it (Argon) available as soon as we can and as safely as we can. So hold tight, lots more coming, and you're going to see us iterating rapidly," Pichai said in a post on X.

Argon will launch at an introductory price of $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, with cached input tokens priced at 95% off the input token price, the blog post notes.