Google launches Gemini 4 Carbon with a ‘significant leap’ in cybersecurity

Google has released its latest frontier model, Gemini 4 Carbon, offering “significant gains” in coding, agentic tasks, and cybersecurity. In an announcement on Wednesday, Google highlights Carbon’s top spot on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index (v5.0) benchmark, with Claude Opus 5.5 and GPT-6 Astra trailing behind.

The new Gemini 4 Carbon model offers improvements over Argon, which Google released earlier this month. It’s currently only available to a select group of cybersecurity defense companies, but it will eventually expand to other partners in its Fairwind Program.

[Image: Carbon sits ahead of Claude Opus 5.5 and GPT-6 Astra. https://platform.theverge.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/10/Artificial-Analysis-Intelligence-Index-Score-28-Oct-26.png?quality=90&strip=all]

The company says Carbon reflects the “pace at which we’re pushing the frontier forward,” coming with a “significant leap” in cyberdefense that makes it better at finding vulnerabilities and generating secure code. Carbon currently holds the number one spot on SEC-bench Pro, a 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.

[Image: Gemini 4 Carbon also beat GPT-6 Astra on the SEC-bench Pro cybersecurity benchmark. https://platform.theverge.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/10/Screenshot-2026-10-28-at-3.57.19-PM.png?quality=90&strip=all]

Google says Gemini 4 Carbon is built for completing longer tasks, adding that its internal teams have seen it “run for days to persist through dead ends to tackle complex, multi-step engineering tasks.” It’s also better at avoiding shortcuts, resisting prompt injection attacks, and collaborating with users, according to Google. Carbon is supposed to offer more “transparency and honesty” as well, by cutting “unsupported claims” by two times when compared to Argon.

It will launch at the same competitive introductory price as Argon, at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens.