Just weeks after releasing its latest frontier model, Google has stepped up to the plate with another one designed specifically for security and heavy agentic workloads.
On Wednesday, the tech giant released Gemini Carbon claiming state-of-the-art performance on cybersecurity and long horizon capabilities. The company said Carbon offers substantial gains on coding, agentic tasks and key capabilities for cyber defense, as well as shows decreases in misalignment and "fabrication rates," or the rate that it creates false responses, in internal testing on living code environments.
The model builds on Argon, the company's frontier model unveiled in late September. The company said that it worked with the US government's voluntary framework for pre-release model testing, and will make the model available to a "subset of cyber defenders" starting this week, gradually extending access to partners through its Fairwind program over time before making it generally available.
"Carbon illustrates the pace at which we’re pushing the frontier forward," Google said in its announcement. "Our researchers and models are working hand in hand to advance capabilities faster, while strengthening our safeguards in tandem."
Google touted a number of safety and security advancements with Carbon, noting that it reduced the model's cheating and shortcut attempts, cut unsupported claims by two times compared to its predecessor Argon, resisted "every evaluated attack attempt" for prompt injection, and cut down overreach to keep it from breaking free of constraints.
As far as benchmarks, Carbon sits at the top of the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, which itself was updated on Wednesday to reflect updates to existing benchmarks and the addition of two new evaluations for coding and science tasks.
- Carbon just outranks Claude Opus 5.5 and GPT-6 Astra in the index, scoring a 59 to their respective 58 and 57. Additionally, it sweeps these competitors on benchmarks for software engineering, agentic tasks, exploit finding, knowledge work, and more.
- It only falls behind competitors on two benchmarks: OSWorld, a benchmark testing multimodal AI agents on open-ended computer tasks, and FrontierSWE, which evaluates ultra-long-horizon software engineering.
Carbon will launch at the same introductory price as Argon, sitting at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, with cached input tokens priced at 95% off input token price. That's on par with OpenAI's GPT-6.1 Sol and Athropic's Claude Sonnet 5.5, which each cost $2 per million input, $10 per million output, and 10 cents per million cached reads.
Our Deeper View #
As we've said before, Google still has all the ingredients to win in AI, with a trusted brand legacy, large existing enterprise market share, and practically boundless cash and compute resources. But Google hasn't been able to keep up with OpenAI and Anthropic on speed. Throughout 2026, the two upstart labs have raced to churn out new and improved models at furious pace. Google, meanwhile, has struggled to release a high-end model all year, instead releasing niche and efficiency-focused models that target lower end enterprise tasks. However, Carbon could be a sign that the company is seeking to pick up speed, even as the industry faces broader calls to slow down the pace of the frontier.