Google prices its third-ranked Gemini 4 Argon at half the cost of Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5

Gemini 4 Argon is priced at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, with cached input priced 95% lower.

Access to Argon is initially limited to select cyber defenders and Google's internal teams; broader access will follow starting with paid API customers and Google AI Ultra subscribers, but Google gave no public release date.

Google said Argon agents identified memory optimizations that freed more than 300 TiB across its data centers, with total savings estimated at 500 TiB to 1 PiB.

Argon scored 68% on CWE-bench v1, tying for the top score.

"Starting this rollout in this way gives us more confidence, but also enables us to put a model that is trained and strong in cyber defense in the hands of defenders as soon as possible,"

Jefferies noted that independent testing and real-world deployment remain the "ultimate validation."

"While Google touts the success of internal use cases, the final proof will be in enterprise production environments once the model is fully released,"

Argon's introductory pricing of $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens matches OpenAI's newly discounted GPT-6.1 Sol model.

Over the past three months Alphabet's stock is down about 6%, while Meta is up 19%.

Argon's cached input costs about $0.10 per million tokens.

Argon's per-token rates are half of Claude Opus 5.5's on both input and output.

A job of 1 million input and 1 million output tokens costs $12 on Argon, $24 on Claude Opus 5.5 and $60 on Claude Fable 5.1 at list rates.

Gemini 4 Argon is Google's first flagship model release since February.

Argon's single-trajectory output ceiling is about 15.6 times the previous limit.

Jefferies said Argon appears to set a new benchmark for the cost-performance frontier in foundation models, with pricing well below Claude Fable 5.1 at $10 and $50 and Claude Opus 5.5 at $4 and $20 per million input and output tokens.

JPMorgan Chase analysts wrote that Google needs a significant advance in its personal agent offerings to generate consumer enthusiasm.

Google's personal agent Spark remains limited to paying subscribers, while Meta's Muse is free with usage caps and had more than 5 million downloads as of Sept. 30, according to Sensor Tower.

"Google Gemini 4 Argon shows advanced reasoning on critical tasks, according to benchmarks, particularly legal reasoning, finance and other aspects of enterprise knowledge work, including long-running tasks,"

Nick Patience, AI lead at the Futurum Group, said Argon has made Google competitive again in AI but does not make it the "leader."

Doshi said Google's cheaper, lighter models released over the summer remain essential for everyday agents, while more powerful frontier models provide the additional reasoning required for complex assignments.

The Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, a composite benchmark score, places Gemini 4 as lagging behind only Claude Opus 5.5 and Claude Sonnet 5.5 on its leaderboard.

On the Artificial Analysis index, every OpenAI model on the leaderboard ranks below Argon, since only Claude Opus 5.5 and Claude Sonnet 5.5 rank above it.