Google takes on GPT-6 Astra and Claude with Gemini 4 Argon.
Google has unveiled Gemini 4 Argon, its most capable AI model so far and the first in the Gemini 4 series. Announced on September 30, the new frontier model is built for long, multi-step work across software engineering, legal and finance tasks, and cybersecurity defence. It also ends a long wait, after the company quietly dropped the Gemini 3.5 Pro it had promised for June. A team of Argon agents went through fleet-wide profiling data and freed over 300 TiB of memory across Google’s data centres, with total savings estimated at 500 TiB to 1 PiB. Agents are also moving C/C++ codebases to Rust, including more than 800,000 lines of the Fuchsia Zircon kernel. In the libgav1 video decoder, Argon replaced 32,000 lines of SIMD code, and the result runs 2.7 times faster than the earlier Rust port.
A day after Pichai signed a voluntary AI safety agreement at the White House, Google laid out four areas where it is tightening Argon’s safeguards before a wider release.
“We’re going to make it available as soon as we can and as safely as we can,” CEO Sundar Pichai wrote on X. The catch is that most people cannot use it yet. Argon is first going to a small group of trusted cyber defenders through Google’s Fairwind Program, while the model goes through the US government’s voluntary pre-release access process. Paid API customers and Google AI Ultra subscribers are next in line, though there is no date. Thousands of Googlers have been using Argon internally for weeks. The first is misuse, with the model trained to refuse requests that could aid cyberattacks or chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear (CBRN) weapons. Google now also tracks Argon’s internal activations to catch anyone trying to slip past those refusals, and internal and external red teams have tested these defences.