Google on Wednesday, October 28, unveiled its latest frontier AI model, Gemini 4 Carbon, which it says marks a “significant leap” in cybersecurity defence.It is the search giant’s second major model release in a month, following Gemini 4 Argon. The company says that Carbon offers improvements over Argon in coding, agentic tasks, and cybersecurity. It is better at finding vulnerabilities and generating secure code.The new model also beat OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra, and Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5, and Claude Fable 5.1 in almost every test, according to figures provided by Google.In terms of its release, Google said that it has taken a “deliberative approach” by making Gemini 4 Carbon currently only available to a select group of cybersecurity defense companies, but it will eventually expand to other partners in its Fairwind Program as well.
At launch, Carbon will be available at the same competitive introductory price as Argon, that is, $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens.
Carbon’s debut was accompanied by Google’s latest earnings report which showed stellar third-quarter growth in its cloud computing business but particularly weak growth in Google’s search advertising revenues. The company’s stock dropped nearly 10 per cent in after-hours trading.
Gemini 4 Carbon’s key capabilities
The model is built for completing longer engineering tasks and based on internal tests, it can run for days to persist through dead ends in order to carry out complex, multi-step actions. It is also better at avoiding shortcuts, resisting prompt injection attacks, vulnerability detection, validation, remediation, and collaborating with users, according to Google.
I did say we’d be releasing our models periodically…introducing Gemini 4 Carbon, our next frontier model.
Following Argon’s release just two weeks ago, Carbon shows the pace at which we’re pushing the frontier, it ranks #1 on the recently updated v5.0 of @ArtificialAnlys Intelligence Index at 59. It also leads across key cybersecurity evaluations scoring 88.2% on SEC-bench Pro for finding vulnerabilities, 54.8% on ExploitGym for exploitation, and 71.0% on CWE-bench for patching.
We’re seeing significant improvements in long-horizon tasks even compared to Argon, and we’ve strengthened frontier safeguards.
As we did with Argon, we’re going to roll it out gradually + responsibly. Some trusted cyber defenders will get access starting this week. We’ll be expanding it to more partners through our Fairwind Program, ahead of wider availability soon, so hang tight!
— Sundar Pichai (@sundarpichai) October 28, 2026
Carbon is more transparent as well, cutting unsupported claims by two times when compared to Argon. It is also apparently twice as likely to generate code that is free of vulnerabilities versus Argon. Meanwhile, Google Chrome engineers found that Carbon is ten times better at generating high-quality patches compared to non-Google models.Story continues below this ad
Performance on benchmarks
Carbon secured the top stop on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index (v5.0) benchmark, with Claude Opus 5.5 and GPT-6 Astra trailing behind.
Carbon also leads on SEC-bench Pro, a cybersecurity benchmark that measures an AI model’s ability to discover real-world bugs, and ExploitGym, which measures how a model can turn a vulnerability into exploits.
Carbon further increased its score by 89 points on WebDev Arena, now ranking at number four on the leaderboard. To be sure, benchmarks are considered to only offer a partial picture of model performance, particularly when frontier models score within a few points of one another, as they do in some of these tests.