Google prices Gemini 4 Argon at $2 per million tokens, a fifth of OpenAI and Anthropic's $10 flagships

On October 13 Google released Gemini 4 Argon to developers and businesses worldwide↗, its first frontier model since Gemini 3 in November 2025 and the first built after a brutal summer: chief executive Sundar Pichai promised Gemini 3.5 Pro for June, canceled it in September, and moved DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis out of the lab's chief executive seat in August in favor of Koray Kavukcuoglu ¹²³⁸. Argon's introductory price is $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output↗, tokens being the chunks of text models bill by, through November 30 ²⁴. That is one-fifth the list price of OpenAI'sPVT$1.18T — OpenAI, private, latest valuation $1.18T GPT-6 Astra and Anthropic'sPVT$350B — Anthropic, private, latest valuation $350B Claude Fable 5.1, both at $10 and $50 ¹⁵⁶.

The fifth applies to the flagship tier only

The discount is narrower than the headline. OpenAI already sells GPT-6.1 Sol, and Anthropic sells Claude Sonnet 5.5, at the same $2 and $10 ⁴⁵. Argon's own standard rate doubles to $4 and $20 on December 1, the exact list price of Claude Opus 5.5 and of Meta's▼−2.41% — Meta, down 2.41 percent today Muse Wonder, released a day before Argon ⁴⁷¹⁰. What the fifth actually squeezes is the $10/$50 flagship tier, where independent evaluator Artificial Analysis scores Argon at 53, tied with Astra and Fable 5.1 and below Opus 5.5 at 58 and Muse Wonder Full at 56 ⁴.

What Google claims, and where it trails

Google says engineers using Argon in its Antigravity coding platform raised agent-written code submissions 35% over four weeks while cutting rollbacks 30%, and that more than 100,000 employees use it internally; named early customers include Deloitte, LexisNexis, Ambience HealthcarePVT~$1.25B — Ambience Healthcare, private, latest valuation ~$1.25B and Alphabet's▲+0.39% — Alphabet, up 0.39 percent today Isomorphic LabsPVT$600M — Isomorphic Labs, private, latest valuation $600M ²⁴. On Google's own comparison chart↗, Astra still beats Argon on FrontierSWE v2, 65.5% to 55.0% ⁹. Sam Witteveen, chief executive of Red Dragon AI, calls Argon "a really, really, really good model" but not the best available ⁴. Buyers were already price-sensitive: two months after launch, Fable 5 drew only about 11% of Anthropic model spending across roughly 70,000 companies in Ramp card data↗ ⁶.

Alphabet's income statement funds the cut

Alphabet earned $40.8 billion of operating income on $119.8 billion of revenue in the second quarter of 2026↗, a 34% margin, and spent $44.9 billion on capital expenditure, the first quarter in two years that capex outran its $39.1 billion of operating cash flow ¹¹. Meta spent $30.1 billion in the same quarter ¹⁰. The labs charging $10/$50 are private; the company subsidizing the frontier at $2/$10 funds it from a listed income statement.

The window closes on November 30

The introductory rate runs seven weeks. What decides the trade is whether developers move workloads at $2/$10 before the doubling, whether OpenAI or Anthropic cut flagship list prices to hold them, and what Alphabet's next earnings print shows for cloud growth against that capex line ⁴¹¹. Free and Plus users still have no access date ¹. Every token Google serves at $2 is a token OpenAI has to defend at $10.