Google ships Gemini 4 Carbon, tops AA Intelligence Index at 59

Google released Gemini 4 Carbon on October 28 and placed it at the top of the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v5.0 at a score of 59, framing the launch around cybersecurity rather than general-purpose capability. First access is routed through the company's Fairwind Program to 'a subset of cyber defenders' before developers and consumers; in the announcement post, Google DeepMind SVP Koray Kavukcuoglu calls it 'our strongest model with state-of-the-art cybersecurity and long horizon capabilities.'

The pricing is aggressive on the way in. Introductory rates are $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output, with cached input tokens priced 95% off; the step-up to $4 and $20 after the introductory window is already published. On the security evaluations Google led with, Carbon posts 88.2% on SEC-bench Pro for vulnerability detection, 71.0% on CWE-bench for patching, and 54.8% on ExploitGym, and records a 0.0% attack-success rate on Gray Swan's Indirect Prompt Injection Benchmark.

The sharpest internal claim comes from Chrome. Carbon 'performed more than 10X better than another lab's large frontier model when generating high quality patches,' Google says of the Chrome team's own tests, and reports 'more than 2x uplift in success rate for generating secure code over Argon,' the previous model.

None of those headline numbers have been reproduced outside Google. The 10x Chrome comparison does not name the rival model, the Gray Swan 0.0% is Google's own count against an evaluated attack set, and Fairwind's membership is not disclosed.

The launch lands the same day Anthropic's Frontier Red Team said an unreleased Claude chained flaws into working browser and OS exploits; cyber-defense capability is where the labs are currently fighting out the frontier.