Google Launches Gemini 4 Carbon, Beats GPT-6 Astra, Claude Opus 5.5 On Most Benchmarks

Google has introduced Gemini 4 Carbon, its newest frontier model, barely two weeks after rolling out Gemini 4 Argon. The pace of the follow-up is itself the headline — Google CEO Sundar Pichai framed Carbon’s speedy arrival as proof of how fast the company now intends to push the frontier, and the benchmark numbers Google has published back that claim up, with Carbon edging out both OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra and Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5 across the majority of the evaluations the company disclosed. Announcing the model, Pichai wrote that Carbon “ranks #1 on the recently updated v5.0 of Artificial Analysis’ Intelligence Index at 59,” and highlighted its cybersecurity results — 88.2% on SEC-bench Pro for finding vulnerabilities, 54.8% on ExploitGym for exploitation, and 71.0% on CWE-bench for patching.