Google restricts Gemini 4 Argon rollout to trusted cyber defenders

Google announced Gemini 4 Argon on September 30 and restricted the model’s initial rollout to a set of trusted cybersecurity defenders through its Fairwind Program. Independent reporting corroborated the announcement and access limit; the performance and capability descriptions are Google’s claims.

The restriction means paid API customers, Google AI Ultra subscribers and other prospective users cannot yet access Argon. Google said it will gather feedback from early testers and refine guardrails before expanding availability to developers, enterprises and consumers, starting with paid API customers and Ultra subscribers. It did not give a date for the next phase.

For context on the company’s earlier use of vetted access, see Google’s earlier Gemini cyber model. Google also said it is participating in the US government’s voluntary process for pre-release model access as distribution expands.

Google plans to give trusted defenders and its internal teams a version without cyber guardrails. The company claims Argon can autonomously find, validate and patch critical software vulnerabilities. It reported a score of 68% on CWE-bench v1, a vulnerability-remediation test, along with 77.9% on the DeepSWE v1.1 software-engineering benchmark, 51.3% on AutomationBench and 91.7% on the LVBench long-video test. The opened sources did not independently replicate those results or validate the claimed capabilities in real-world use.

Google says Argon’s maximum output is one million tokens, up from 64,000. It plans introductory API prices of $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, with cached input priced at a 95% discount. A footnote to the announcement says the input and output prices will later rise to $4 and $20 per million tokens, respectively.

The Fairwind Program launched on September 2 as a limited-access channel for a trusted group of Google Cloud customers, government agencies and cybersecurity partners. The size and membership of the initial Argon cohort have not been disclosed.