Google unveils Gemini 4 Argon for a limited group, at half its standard price for now

Google announced its new flagship, Gemini 4 Argon, on September 30 (US time). For now it is available only through the Fairwind Program for cyber defenders and the US government's voluntary pre-release process. Google says broader access comes "as soon as possible," starting with paid API customers and Google AI Ultra subscribers. The @Google launch post drew 18,000 likes, and Sundar Pichai's drew 12,000.

API pricing during the introductory period is $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, with a 95% discount on cached input. After that it doubles to $4 in and $20 out. For now that matches the price of this week's GPT-6.1 Sol and Sonnet 5.5 ($2 and $10).

The output limit is 1 million tokens per response, up from 64,000. That is the length of a single answer, not the context window, so a long task can finish in one response. Google says feedback from early testers will help harden its safeguards before it rolls Argon out to developers, enterprises and consumers.