Google rolled out its latest AI model, Gemini 4 Carbon, to the general public on November 10, 2026, following a two-week limited release to a select group of “cybersecurity defenders.” The company describes Carbon as its “strongest model” yet and positions it as a direct competitor to leading systems from Anthropic and OpenAI.
Carbon is designed for demanding tasks that, in Google’s words, “test the limits of a model’s intelligence,” including complex multi-step coding and open-ended scientific research. Google says its other recently launched frontier model, Argon — released just last month — will remain “the ideal choice for the majority of software engineering and knowledge work,” with Carbon intended for more intensive use cases.
Alongside the release, Google previewed a “swarm” feature on its agentic development platform Antigravity, which allows users to turn a single prompt “into a coordinated team of agents,” aimed at supporting long-horizon AI agent workflows.
Carbon is available immediately via the Gemini API in Google AI Studio and Gemini for business for paying developers and enterprises, as well as to Google AI Ultra subscribers through the Gemini app, AI Mode in Search, and Antigravity. It is not yet clear whether or when Carbon will reach lower-tier or free users.
Google is launching Carbon at an introductory price of $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens — roughly one-fifth the cost of OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra and one-quarter the cost of Anthropic’s Fable 5.2, which launched the day prior. Those introductory prices are set to double at the end of November. Even after that increase, Google says Carbon will remain cheaper than frontier rivals on a per-token basis, though per-token pricing does not always translate directly to lower overall costs.
Benchmarks cited by Google indicate Carbon ranks among the most capable models currently available across most metrics, though behind Anthropic’s Fable 5.2. The rapid back-to-back releases of Argon and Carbon suggest Google is reasserting itself at the forefront of frontier AI development, a space that had recently appeared dominated by Anthropic and OpenAI.
Source: The Verge