Google's New AI Came Close to Claude Opus for a Quarter of the Price

Gemini 4 Argon is out now for paid Gemini users (Pro and Ultra), developers via the API, and GitHub Copilot.

• Up to 1 million tokens at once (input and output combined)
• Built for coding, finance, legal, science and cybersecurity
• Launch price: $2 per million input tokens, $10 per million output

On the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index it scores 53: tied with GPT-6 Astra, just behind Opus 5.5 (58). Running that full test cost about $2,400 on Argon vs $8,700 on Opus.

Two catches:

• It used almost twice as many tokens as Astra, so cheaper per token isn’t always cheaper per job
• The launch price doubles to $4/$20 after November 30

If you run AI agents, test it on your own tasks while it’s cheap.