Google released Gemini 4 Carbon to developers, enterprises, scientists, and consumers on Tuesday.The company says its latest frontier model is the top performer on three independent agent benchmarks at less than half the per-task cost of the next-best outside model.Gemini 4 model leads CursorBench 4.0, WANDR and AutomationBenchIn the launch post, Google DeepMind SVP Koray Kavukcuoglu wrote that Carbon topped CursorBench 4.0, Perplexity’s WANDR, and Zapier’s AutomationBench. Google says it costs less than half what the next closest outside model costs per task.Google built Carbon for long, multi-step jobs. Complex coding and debugging, open-ended scientific research, and cybersecurity are its targets.Separately, Google cooperated with Artificial Analysis to build the Multimodal Knowledge Agent benchmark. It assesses how models reason over dense files such as charts, blueprints, and tables.Carbon was there in second place. Google says it operated at an average cost per task more than six times lower than the model that beat it.Carbon matched the best model tested on Hebbia’s E2E Financial Agentic evaluation and was first of 23 frontier model configurations on the Balyasny Asset Management General Financial Intelligence benchmark.Carbon goes deeper and runs longer verification loops before it answers, which means it uses more tokens than its sibling model, Gemini 4 Argon.API rates climb to $4 and $20 after November 30Google is retaining Argon, the model it debuted last month. The company said that Argon is still the recommended choice for most software engineering and knowledge work.Carbon is left for things that stretch the limits of a model’s intelligence. It was released in two steps, with cybersecurity defenders getting early access via the Fairwind Program two weeks ago.Both models have the same introductory API price of $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens. Google said Carbon’s rates will leap to $4 and $20 after the introductory period ends November 30.Cryptopolitan reported that Argon’s price opened below Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5 ($4 and $20) and OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra ($10 and $50).Paid-tier developers are able to build with Carbon in Google AI Studio and Android Studio. Enterprises can obtain it in Gemini for business.Google AI Ultra subscribers pay $100 per month and get access to Carbon in the Gemini app, AI Mode in Search, and Antigravity.Google is previewing /swarm inside Antigravity, which converts one prompt into a team of coordinated agents. Developers are able to pin Carbon to the roles requiring the greatest reasoning, such as architecture and auditing, while the lighter models manage the parallel work.Four weeks ago, Google said it was taking applications for 10,000 scientists to use Argon in Antigravity for free for six months. Thousands onboarded, and current and future participants get Carbon too.Early testers put Carbon to work in security and biology. Wiz’s team detected 0-day flaws in two major SaaS providers in under two hours, Google said.Google researchers also retrieved on average 40 times more remote homologs across 7 low-homolog protein families using Carbon. Those homologs are used by structure prediction models like AlphaFold 3.Don’t just read crypto news. Understand it. Subscribe to our newsletter. It's free.