Gemini 3.8 Flash is Google's third budget model in six weeks while frontier models remain MIA

Google released Gemini 3.8 Flash, its third budget model in six weeks, which matches Claude Opus 5 on some agentic coding benchmarks at a lower cost, according to The Decoder. However, the model's reasoning burns about 30 percent more output tokens per task, making it pricier in practice than its predecessor despite identical token rates.