Google's Gemini 4 Argon Rolls Out to Cyber Defenders First

Google released Gemini 4 Argon on September 30, 2026, and the first users are not paying customers but trusted cyber defenders inside its Fairwind Program. Paid API access and Google AI Ultra subscribers come after, and the company says it is engaged in the U.S. government's voluntary pre-release model access process.

The announcement, written by SVP of Google DeepMind and Chief AI Architect Koray Kavukcuoglu, leans on code and security numbers. Argon posts 77.9% on DeepSWE v1.1, ties for first at 68% on CWE-bench v1 for vulnerability remediation, and lands at 51.3% on AutomationBench for end-to-end business tasks. Output length now stretches to one million tokens, up from 64K on the prior generation. Introductory pricing is $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output, rising to $4 and $20 after the intro window. Cybersecurity firm Wiz is named as an early user through its Scan for Good initiative, one more entry in what has already been a heavy quarter of AI cybersecurity coverage on our tracker.

Bloomberg reported the same day that some Google employees with direct access to the model say Argon performs less well on real coding tasks than the benchmarks suggest. Google told Bloomberg the characterization is inaccurate. One employee said there is "large consensus" inside the company that the model is at the frontier.

Kavukcuoglu's own line in the post: "Argon is fundamentally changing the way we work and build at Google." That is a claim about internal use, published the same week Bloomberg's sources describe the internal picture as less uniform. A broader release date for the paid tiers was not announced.