Two weeks ago, Google gave Gemini 4 Carbon to a small group of cybersecurity defenders through its Fairwind Program. Now, Carbon is available to developers, businesses, scientists, and Google AI Ultra subscribers.
Gemini Argon remains Google’s go-to pick for most coding and office work. Carbon is meant for jobs that push a model to its limits, like complicated debugging or open-ended scientific research. It uses more tokens than Argon, and it spends that extra effort exploring options and verifying its answers.
Where does Carbon really shine?
The numbers make the strongest case. Carbon ranked first on CursorBench 4.0, Perplexity’s WANDR, and Zapier’s AutomationBench, and its cost per task was less than half that of the next best model from another company.
- Office documents: Legal and finance teams can feed it dense documents full of charts and tables, and it sticks to strict formatting when building spreadsheets, presentations, and reports.
- Web apps: While building an app, Carbon keeps testing its code, recovers when something breaks, and checks how the finished interface looks before wrapping up.
- Security: Wiz used it to scan two major SaaS providers, and the model uncovered 0-day vulnerabilities in under two hours, a job that would normally take weeks of research.
- Lab work: Carbon helped drug toxicity research company Axiom Bio find new toxicity mechanisms its team hadn’t discovered before, and Axiom is now moving its production scientific analyses and agents to Carbon and Argon.
Developers also get an early look at /swarm in Google Antigravity. Carbon can take on design, coordination, and reviewing there, while lighter and faster models work on the rest in parallel.
Can you try Gemini 4 Carbon today?
If you’re a Google AI Ultra subscriber, Carbon is rolling out to you in the Gemini app, AI Mode in Search, and Google Antigravity. Paying developers and businesses can use it through the API in Google AI Studio and Gemini for business at Argon’s introductory rate of $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens.
Scientists can apply for a chance at six months of free access to both models, and cybersecurity defenders can apply to the Fairwind Program.