Gemini 4 Carbon tops Artificial Analysis v5.0 two weeks after Argon, leading on cyber-defense evals

Gemini 4 Carbon is DeepMind's new flagship. It arrives only two weeks after Gemini 4 Argon. Sundar Pichai framed the gap as deliberate: 'I did say we'd be releasing our models periodically.' Carbon ranks #1 on Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v5.0 with 59 points. Google is pitching it for multi-day, autonomous development workflows and for long-horizon tasks.

The headline numbers are about security. Carbon scores 88.2% on SEC-bench Pro (finding vulnerabilities), 54.8% on ExploitGym (exploiting them) and 71.0% on CWE-bench (patching them). Rollout is gated: vetted security organizations get access first through Google's Fairwind Program. Pricing is $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens.

Competitively, Carbon lands in the same week as OpenAI's GPT-6.1 Terra rollout. It also follows recent Claude Opus 5.5 results that have dominated developer chatter. The launch topped Hacker News at 826 points with 690 comments.

The reception is skeptical. Developers question publishing benchmarks before broad access. r/ClaudeAI's mood was 'I'll believe it when I see it,' with users recalling 'benchmaxxed' past Google releases. Security engineers on dev.to are asking whether Carbon's automated patches actually block exploits while preserving the original program behavior. Users are also confused about which Gemini tiers get access.

What to watch: independent patch-verification results, and whether access widens beyond the vetted security partners.