Gemini 4 Carbon priced at $2 input and $10 output per million tokens, later $4 and $20
Google announced Gemini 4 Carbon on October 28, 2026 at an introductory $2 per million input and $10 per million output tokens, with cached input 95% off, rising to $4 and $20 after the introductory period. Access starts with a subset of cyber defenders. No end date or plan list is given.
SessionWatcher editorial · Published · Updated · Source announcement: 2026-10-28
What Google announced and what Carbon costs
Google announced Gemini 4 Carbon on October 28, 2026 as its next frontier model. It builds on Gemini 4 Argon, which launched two weeks earlier. Google says Carbon is designed for harder, long-horizon engineering problems and sustained agentic workflows.
Carbon will launch at the same introductory price as Argon: $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, with cached input tokens priced at 95% off the input price. A footnote says that after the introductory period expires, $4 per 1M input tokens and $20 per 1M output tokens will apply. The blog post does not say when the introductory period ends.
Who can use Carbon now
Google says that starting this week it will make Carbon available to a subset of cyber defenders and will gradually give more trusted partners access through its Fairwind Program. It says it will keep gathering feedback and refining guardrails before making Carbon available to developers, businesses and consumers through its product surfaces as soon as possible. The post gives no date for that wider release.
The blog post does not name Google AI plans, Gemini CLI, Antigravity or any third-party coding tool as getting Carbon.
What it means for your bill
The announced rates are per-token prices. During the introductory period, output costs five times as much as input, and cached input at 95% off the $2 input price works out to $0.10 per million tokens. When the introductory period expires, input and output prices double to $4 and $20 per million tokens. The footnote does not say whether the cached input discount changes at that point.
For now, Carbon is limited to selected cyber defenders and partners, so most paying users cannot run it or be charged for it yet. The blog post does not say how Carbon would count toward usage limits on any Google AI plan or coding tool once it opens up.
AI assisted reporting, checked against the linked official sources. Source pages checked 2026-10-28. Editorial process and corrections.