Gemini 4 Argon’s $2/$10 Price Is Half the Later Rate

Google says Gemini 4 Argon will launch at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens. A footnote on Google’s own announcement of 30 September 2026 says $4 and $20 apply after an introductory period it does not define. Those are Google’s claims, the benchmark scores are Google’s too, and this publication verified none of them independently.

The Price Has a Footnote

Google’s announcement of Gemini 4 Argon says it “will launch at an introductory price of $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, with cached input tokens priced at 95% off input token price.” The word introductory carries a footnote.

The footnote reads: “After the introductory period expires, the price of $4 per 1M input tokens and $20 per 1M output tokens will apply.” The post does not say how long the introductory period lasts.

This publication’s own arithmetic: the launch price is half the post-introductory price on both input and output. If the 95% discount applies to the price in force, cached input is $0.10 per million tokens at launch and $0.20 after.

Who Can Use It Now

Google says Argon is rolling out to a set of trusted cyber defenders through its Fairwind Program, and that it is engaged in the U.S. government’s voluntary process for pre-release model access while it gradually expands access.

It says broad availability will start with paid API customers and Google AI Ultra subscribers, and gives no date beyond “as soon as possible.” The $2 and $10 price is therefore one Google has announced for a launch that has not yet happened.

The Benchmarks Google Chose

Google says Argon sets a new state of the art on DeepSWE v1.1 at 77.9%, ranks first on Zapier’s AutomationBench at 51.3%, and is state of the art on LVBench at 91.7%. On CWE-bench v1, which evaluates fixing security vulnerabilities, it says Argon ties for first place with 68%.

It also says Argon is the leading model on the Vals Index, and shows similarly leading performance on Vals Finance Agent v2 and Harvey’s Legal Agent Benchmark, without giving scores for those three.

All of these are Google’s reported results. This publication did not open any of the leaderboards and did not repeat any test.

Google’s Own Workloads

Google says Argon agents analyzing fleet-wide profiling telemetry freed up over 300 TiB of memory once rolled out, with an estimated 500 TiB to 1 PiB in total savings, and that in one quantum-computing example the model beat a published baseline by 40% in minutes.

It says Argon agents are migrating C and C++ code to Rust, from tens of thousands of lines in core libraries up to 800,000 lines or more for the Fuchsia Zircon kernel, and that for the libgav1 video decoder the result runs 2.7 times faster than the existing Rust port with identical video output.

Google adds that these rewrites are undergoing automated and manual auditing, emulation testing and review before they reach production.

One Million Output Tokens

Google says it is expanding Argon’s output token limit to an industry-leading 1 million tokens, up from the previous 64,000. This publication’s own arithmetic: that is about 15.6 times the earlier limit.

The post does not say what that costs. This publication’s own arithmetic: one maximum-length response of 1 million output tokens comes to $10 at the launch price and $20 at the later price, ignoring input and cached tokens.

What Is Not Established

The length of the introductory period and the date of broad availability are not given, and neither is the effective date of the $4 and $20 prices. The benchmark scores and internal results are Google’s claims and were not independently verified.

For the earlier piece on Argon’s cyber guardrails, see this publication’s coverage of the Fairwind Program. Nothing here is investment advice.