Google launches Gemini 4 Carbon, its most powerful AI model, igniting frontier price war

Google launched Gemini 4 Carbon, its most advanced AI model, intensifying the frontier AI price war. The release follows Anthropic's new models by 24 hours, despite earlier industry calls to slow development. Carbon targets maximum reasoning tasks like complex debugging and open-ended scientific research. Google offers it at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output until November 30, then prices double. This is four times cheaper than Anthropic's Fable 5.2 or ChatGPT's Astra. The model features autonomous agent workflows and enterprise tools for legal, financial, and programming tasks. A cybersecurity version, available only to accredited defenders, found zero-day vulnerabilities in two SaaS providers in under two hours. Google reports safeguards blocked 99% of attacks, with a 0.8% breach rate per attempt.