Google announces Gemini 4 flagship AI model after months of delays

SAN FRANCISCO — Alphabet's Google on Wednesday announced a new top-tier artificial intelligence model to anchor its Gemini 4 generation of models in a fresh bid to catch up to rivals Anthropic and OpenAI in the AI race. The new model, "Argon", is larger in size than Google's previous line of advanced "Pro" models, a company spokesperson said. "It's our most performant model yet built for complex workloads, and we see it comparable to frontier models like (OpenAI's) Astra and (Anthropic's) Opus on key coding and cyber benchmarks," the spokesperson said. Google said it was providing the model to select cybersecurity partners and was participating in the Trump administration's voluntary process for pre-release model access. It did not provide a timeline for the model's public release. The model posted better marks than Astra and Opus in terms of self-reported performance on several industry benchmarks, per a company press release. Still, Argon remained behind on certain other metrics, including two of the four coding-related benchmarks Google included in the release. Google no longer plans