Google's new frontier model costs $2 in, $10 out - OpenAI's price - and only cyber defenders can use it

On Wednesday Google announced its new frontier model, priced it to the cent where OpenAI had priced its own a day earlier, and handed it to cyber defenders instead of customers. The same day the Federal Trade Commission told reporters it is investigating OpenAI and Anthropic over what their products might do to consumers - and published nothing. This issue is about the price of the frontier, the paper behind the probe, and the one test to run on an agent before it gets your keys.

The Signal - $2 in, $10 out: Google matches OpenAI's price with a model you can't use yet

What happened: On Wednesday 30 September Google DeepMind announced Gemini 4 Argon, its new frontier model, "rolling out to a set of trusted cyber defenders" first, at an introductory $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output - the same two prices OpenAI set for GPT-6.1 Sol on Tuesday. Cached input is 95% off, and the output limit rises to 1 million tokens from 64,000.

The details:

• Google's figures: a new state of the art on DeepSWE v1.1 at 77.9%, first on Zapier's AutomationBench at 51.3%, and the lead on the Vals Index, which weights finance, coding, legal and tax work by their share of US GDP.
• For trusted defenders and Google's own teams the model ships "without cyber guardrails"; through Wiz's Scan for Good programme it "uncovered a critical vulnerability exposing sensitive personal information across healthcare software used by hospitals worldwide".
• Google is "actively engaged in the U.S. government's voluntary process for pre-release model access", and will monitor Argon's "chain-of-thought and actions and stop execution when necessary".
• No date for anyone else. Developers, enterprises and consumers get it "as soon as possible", "starting with paid API customers and Google AI Ultra subscribers".

What it means for you: The price of frontier-class work was set this week, twice, at $2 in and $10 out. If you buy by the token, Wednesday's one-fifth test now has a second list to price against - the day Argon lands. Until then nothing changes on your bill; what changed is the ceiling two labs expect you to pay.

The counterweight: Every number is Google's report of its own and third-party benchmarks, read off its page, and the price is "introductory" in a footnote.