Google's Gemini 4 Carbon tops AA Index v5 and cyber benchmarks, but most developers can't use it yet

Sundar Pichai announced Gemini 4 Carbon on LinkedIn ('I did say we'd be releasing our models periodically'), drawing nearly 39K likes. Carbon arrives just two weeks after Argon. It ranks first on the updated Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v5.0 at 59, and Google says it leads on 15 of 17 key technical evaluations, with notable gains in long-horizon tasks over Argon.

The positioning is cybersecurity. Carbon scores 88.2% on SEC-bench Pro for finding vulnerabilities, 54.8% on ExploitGym for exploitation and 71% on CWE-bench for patching. Because those capabilities cut both ways, Google is staging the release and giving vetted enterprise defenders access first. DeepMind SVP Koray Kavukcuoglu calls it Google's strongest model yet. DeepMind also unveiled Genie 4, its next-generation world simulator.

Community reaction was huge: 1,001 points and 796 comments on HN, 1,562 upvotes on r/singularity, and an r/Anthropic thread titled 'Google has beaten Anthropic for the first time'. Ars Technica's headline captured the frustration: 'its latest frontier AI model that you can't use.' HN commenters also debated whether Carbon is a post-trained Argon checkpoint rather than an architectural leap.

Cyber is now the shared battleground: Mistral Large 4 and AWS Continuum launched with security pitches the same week. Watch for the broad API availability date and pricing, and whether Anthropic answers quickly.