Google announces Gemini 4 Carbon, but cyber defenders get it first

Google DeepMind announced Gemini 4 Carbon, which it calls its strongest model, aimed at long-running coding work and cybersecurity. Google reports 88.2% on SEC-bench Pro for finding vulnerabilities, 71.0% on CWE-bench for patching, and about half as many unsupported claims as Gemini 4 Argon in its internal testing. It is not generally available yet: a small group of cyber defenders gets access this week, and Google says developers, businesses and consumers will get it as soon as possible. Introductory pricing matches Argon at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, rising to $4 and $20 after the introductory period. On Hacker News (781 points, 640 comments), we read the first 25 top-level comments: 7 were confused by the naming and whether Carbon replaces Argon, 3 complained that Google announced a model people cannot use yet, 3 pointed out Carbon was not yet showing on the Artificial Analysis page Google cited, and 2 praised the price. No consensus on quality, since almost nobody had tried it. Sorted take: every number here is Google's own and the model is not open to most people, so treat this as a preview, not a reason to switch.