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A model that costs $7.50 per million output tokens just posted the highest computer-use score in the industry. Not the highest cheap score. The highest score, period.
On July 21, Google shipped Gemini 3.6 Flash. On OSWorld-Verified — the benchmark that measures whether an agent can actually drive a real desktop, click the right buttons, fill the right fields, and finish a multi-step task — it scored 83.0%. That is ahead of GPT-5.6 Luna. Ahead of Grok 4.5. Ahead of Google’s own previous-generation flagship. And it did it as a Flash model: the cheap, fast tier that exists to be the thing you call ten thousand times a day when you can’t afford to call the expensive one.
I have spent two years watching the “cheap tier” lose every benchmark that mattered and win only on price. The whole point of a Flash or a Mini or a Haiku was that you traded capability for cost. Gemini 3.6 Flash broke that trade on the one benchmark where I’d have bet money the trade still held. Here’s what actually happened, the exact numbers, and runnable code so you can point it at your own desktop in about five minutes.