SURREY, B.C. - Google has released its most powerful AI model yet, and Surrey residents who pay for Google’s top AI plans can already find it inside the Gemini app and in AI Mode in Search.
Gemini 4 Argon became globally available on October 13, Google DeepMind executive Koray Kavukcuoglu announced. The model is aimed at deep work on complex, multi-step tasks in coding, finance, legal work, cybersecurity and science. Google says Argon outperforms other frontier models on benchmarks across those domains and ranks first on the Vals Index, which measures model performance across economic sectors such as finance, coding, legal and tax work.
Access depends on how you pay. Everyday users can try Argon in the Gemini app and AI Mode in Search only with a Google AI Ultra or Pro subscription. Developers can build with it through the paid tier of the Gemini API in Google AI Studio and Android Studio, and Ultra subscribers can also use it in Google Antigravity, the company’s agent-first development platform. Enterprises can reach it through Gemini for business, the API and Antigravity. There is no free tier access.
Behind the release is a headline technical change: Argon works with a 1 million token unified input-output limit through the API, which Google describes as industry-leading. In plain terms, the model can read and produce far longer pieces of work in one run, which matters for jobs like restructuring a large codebase or working through a long scientific problem.
Google says its own teams have been using Argon for weeks. Engineers using Argon in Antigravity increased agentic code submissions by more than 35 per cent while cutting code rollbacks by nearly a third. Argon helped the Chrome team finish a refactor across hundreds of files in weeks instead of months. Security firm Wiz used early access to find and fix a file download flaw in healthcare software, a bug Google says could have exposed a master key and put hundreds of thousands of patient records at risk.
Pricing for developers starts at an introductory rate of $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, with cached input tokens at 95 per cent off. The introductory period ends November 30, 2026, when prices rise to $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output tokens.
Google is also putting Argon in front of researchers. It is offering 10,000 scientists the highest usage tier in Google Antigravity free for six months, with applications open and places filled on a rolling basis. Cybersecurity defenders can apply to the Fairwind Program, which is expanding to hundreds of additional partners.
On safety, Google says Argon is significantly better than its previous models at refusing harmful requests, with violations on an adversarial test set reduced nearly two-fold. Attempts to take unauthorized shortcuts on coding benchmarks dropped to 2 per cent, and an automated monitor watches agent reasoning in real time.
For most Surrey readers, the takeaway is modest but real. If your household or workplace already pays for Google AI Pro or Ultra, a stronger model is now sitting in the tools you use. If it does not, Argon is a look at where paid AI is heading: longer tasks, higher prices, and more of the work done while you are away from the keyboard.
Source: Google
Advertisements
