Google launches Gemini 4 Carbon with a ‘significant leap’ in cybersecurity

Google has released its latest frontier model, Gemini 4 Carbon, offering “significant gains” in coding, agentic tasks, and cybersecurity. In an announcement on Wednesday, Google highlights Carbon’s top spot on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index (v5.0) benchmark, with Claude Opus 5.5 and GPT-6 Astra trailing behind.

The new Gemini 4 Carbon model offers improvements over Argon, which Google released earlier this month. It’s currently only available to a select group of cybersecurity defense companies, but it will eventually expand to other partners in its Fairwind Program.

[Image: Carbon sits ahead of Claude Opus 5.5 and GPT-6 Astra. https://platform.theverge.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/10/Artificial-Analysis-Intelligence-Index-Score-28-Oct-26.png?quality=90&strip=all]

The company says Carbon reflects the “pace at which we’re pushing the frontier forward,” coming with a “significant leap” in cyberdefense that makes it better at finding vulnerabilities and generating secure code.