Gemini 4 Argon hits 97.5% on ARC-AGI-3, making Google the second lab past 95%

Days after Sundar Pichai announced Gemini 4 Argon, the model posted 97.5% on ARC-AGI-3. That makes Google the second lab, after OpenAI, to clear the 95% bar on the benchmark. François Chollet wrote that Argon "has a similar performance profile on ARC-AGI-3 as Astra. Google is back at the frontier."

The run cost $4,800 and used the Provider Adapter Harness. The harness lets each vendor use its own features, such as retained reasoning and context compaction.

Adoption signals are piling up:

- Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas says Argon set a new SoTA on the WANDR (Wide-And-Deep-Research) benchmark and is live for all Perplexity users.

- Google DeepMind showed four Argon agents beating Minecraft from scratch in 27 hours, writing 2,783 programs with no human help.

- Google Cloud cited a $514B backlog and 22 billion API tokens processed per minute.

The reception is not uniformly positive. Skeptics question whether harness-assisted scores are comparable across labs. Some r/GeminiAI users say the quantized web version codes worse than Gemini 3.1 Pro.