Gemini 4 Carbon: Google's Best AI and You CAN'T Use It
Google just announced Gemini 4 Carbon, its strongest AI yet, and almost nobody can use it. Outside testers put it first by a single point, but they also found one thing that got worse. Here is all of it, explained simply. What you'll learn: → What an AI "model" is, and why Carbon works more like a mechanic than a waiter → What "number one" really means: benchmarks, the Artificial Analysis decathlon, and Arena's blind taste test → Google's cybersecurity results, and the fine print (10 hours vs 6 hours) → What outside testers found: the wins, the losses, and the surprise (it bluffs more) → Why Google is keeping it locked, and what it will cost developers → What it means for you today Honest trade-offs: Carbon leads the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index by one point and tops 4 of its 9 tests. Claude Opus 5.5 beats it at using a computer and at agent coding, it makes things up more often than Gemini 4 Argon, and Google ran two of its three headline security tests itself. ⏱️ Timestamps 0:00 Google's strongest AI, locked away 0:21 What a model is, simply 0:59 Waiter vs mechanic: what's new 1:43 What "number one" really means 2:53 The cybersecurity results 4:04 Outside testers: wins, losses, a surprise 5:52 Why you can't use it yet 7:12 What it means for you Numbers used (checked 29 Oct 2026) • Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v5.0: Gemini 4 Carbon 59, Claude Opus 5.5 58, GPT-6 Astra 57. Carbon is first in 4 of the 9 tests. • Arena text leaderboard: Carbon 1,528, Gemini 4 Argon 1,520 (both "High"). • Google-reported security results: SEC-bench Pro 88.2% (GPT-6 Astra 85.4%). ExploitGym 54.8% with 10 hours per task and 53.5% with 6 hours (Claude Opus 5.5 34.5%, 6 hours). CWE-bench 71.0% (Claude Opus 5.5 67.0%; this one comes from Collinear AI's public leaderboard). • OSWorld-2.1, offline subset, from Google's own table: Claude Opus 5.5 87.2%, Carbon 81.5%. • AA Coding Agent Index: Claude Opus 5.5 in Claude Code 62, Carbon in Google's Antigravity CLI 59. • Hallucination rate (AA-Omniscience): Gemini 4 Argon 4%, Carbon 11%, Claude Opus 5.5 and GPT-6 Astra (max) 50%. • Vals AI: Finance Index #1 of 33, Legal Research Bench #1 of 87, Vals Index #2 of 29, 47 min 45 s per test. • Vending-Bench 2 (Andon Labs): Carbon first with $16,484. • Price for developers when it launches: $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens (introductory), then $4 and $20. Google has given no end date for Carbon's introductory price. Sources Google, "Gemini 4 Carbon: our next frontier model": https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/gemini-models/introducing-gemini-4-carbon/ Google evaluation methodology: https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/gemini/gemini_4_carbon_model_evaluation.pdf Google DeepMind Fairwind Program: https://deepmind.google/fairwind-program/ Artificial Analysis: https://artificialanalysis.ai/articles/gemini-4-carbon-new-number-1 Vals AI: https://www.vals.ai/models/google_gemini-4-carbon Andon Labs Vending-Bench 2: https://andonlabs.com/evals/vending-bench-2 Arena text leaderboard: https://arena.ai/leaderboard/text Hacker News launch thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50276792 Would you pick a faster AI or one that keeps going for days on a big job? Tell me in the comments. Follow Mervin Praison for more AI news, explained simply. #Gemini4 #GeminiCarbon #GoogleAI #AINews #Cybersecurity
