Gemini 4 Carbonが今すぐ呼び出し可能に、価格は20日後に2倍

For twelve days, G​emini 4 Carbon was the best model almost nobody could call. G​oogle announced it on 28 October 2026 to a named cohort of cyber defenders and Fairwind Program partners, with no model ID, no endpoint and no rate card. On 10 November 2026 that changed: gemini-4-carbon is now a stable model on the paid G​emini API, in AI Studio and Android Studio, and for enterprises through G​emini for business. The part worth planning around is the calendar. It costs $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens until 30 November. On 1 December those numbers become $4 and $20 with nothing else about the model changing.

つまりこれはローンチ記事だが、ローンチ自体は本物で、有益な情報はマーケティング文句ではない。アクセスマトリクス、20日間の割引、そして10月時点の「Artificial Analysis Intelligence Indexで第1位」という一文が、同じボード上で今や4位になっているという事実だ。

実際にそれを呼べるのは誰で、まだ呼べないのは誰なのか

11月10日の投稿はチャネルについて異例に具体的で、発表というよりアクセス表として読む価値がある。何が開設されたか：

• Paid G​emini API developers, through AI Studio and Android Studio, with G​oogle AI Ultra subscribers also able to reach it in Antigravity and AI Studio.

• Enterprises, through G​emini for business on either the API or the model dropdown, plus Antigravity and CodeMender.

• Consumers on G​oogle AI Ultra, in the G​emini app and AI Mode in Search.

• 科学者および研究者は申請制で、ArgonとCarbonがAntigravityの最上位ティアに含まれ、資格要件と定員に応じて6か月間無料。

• サイバーディフェンダーは、依然としてFairwindプログラムを通じており、そこがロールアウト全体の開始点です。

What did not open is the free tier. G​oogle's pricing page is explicit: "Not available" for G​emini 4 Carbon, and every processed token is billed — including thinking tokens, and including tool system instructions when grounding is on. There is also no playground-grade ceiling mentioned anywhere in the docs; rate limits are not published on the model page. If you are budgeting a pilot, that is the one number you will have to discover by calling the API rather than by reading about it.

20日価格と、その背後にある崖

G​oogle is running Carbon on the same introductory rate card it used for G​emini 4 Argon: $2 in and $10 out through 30 November, then $4 and $20 from 1 December 2026. The pattern is not new — Argon launched the same way — which is why the date matters more than the discount. A workload priced at the intro rate today is priced 100% higher on the same tokens three weeks from now.

カードの残りの部分こそ、チームが驚かされるポイントです：

• キャッシュ済み入力 — 100万あたり$0.10（11月30日まで）、以降は$0.20。現在の料金では、キャッシュ済みトークンは新規トークンの5%で、この倍率は変更後も維持されます。

バッチとFlex — 標準料金の半額、現在は入力 $1.00、出力 $5.00、12月1日以降は $2.00 と $10.00。ジョブがレイテンシを許容できるなら、これは請求額を抑える最大の手段です。

• 優先 — 標準の1.8倍、現在は入力$3.60／出力$18.00、以降は$7.20／$36.00。

コントリビューター — 入力 $1.00、出力 $5.00、キャッシュ $0.05、招待制プレビュー。一般的な選択肢ではありません。

• Long context — there is no length-based tier. Unlike G​emini 3.1 Pro, which steps up a price band past 200,000 input tokens, Carbon charges the same per-token rate whether you send 2,000 tokens or 900,000. That is a genuine advantage for large-codebase work and it is easy to miss because most vendors of 1M-token models do tier.

Caching is implicit only. Explicit context caching is not supported on Carbon, so you cannot pin a document and guarantee the cached rate the way you can on some other G​emini models. If your saving plan depended on explicit cache hits, it does not apply here.

#1の主張、そして4回の改訂を経て取締役会が語る内容

G​oogle's 28 October post led with a first-place finish on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index. That was accurate for the board as it stood that day. It is not what the board says now, and this is the sort of drift that gets quoted for months after it stops being true.

Read the current listing and G​emini 4 Carbon at high effort scores 60 on Intelligence Index v5.0.1 — fourth of 74 models. Above it sit three configurations of Claude Fable 5.2, at 65, 62 and 62. Carbon's own effort dial moves the number too: medium lands at 58 and low at 54, which means a single "Carbon scores 60" line in a comparison is only true at high effort.

The vendor-reported numbers from the 10 November post, none of which have been independently reproduced, are a different and much louder set: first on CursorBench 4.0, on Perplexity's WANDR and on Zapier's AutomationBench, at what G​oogle describes as more than 2x lower cost per task than the next-best external model; second on a new Multimodal Knowledge Agent benchmark built with Artificial Analysis, at over 6x lower average cost per task than the top model; a tie for best on Hebbia's end-to-end financial evaluation; and top of 23 frontier configurations on Balyasny's GMI. Every one of those is G​oogle's own framing of a benchmark, and the cost-per-task advantage is a claim about a specific task mix, not a general price statement.

The cyber numbers follow the same pattern. On 28 October G​oogle published SEC-bench Pro at 88.2%, ExploitGym at 54.8% and CWE-bench at 71.0%. On 10 November it added Project Fortify at 100% scan recall and 95% triage precision on open-source code, a 25%-plus relative recall gain over Argon, and a 40-fold average increase in homologs retrieved across seven CASP17 protein families. Those are the claims that justify the model's existence for a security team. They are also unaudited by anyone outside G​oogle, and the model has been generally callable for one day.

独立委員会が実際に述べていること、そして重要な数字

Artificial Analysis has measured Carbon rather than repeated G​oogle's chart, and its numbers are the ones to budget against:

• Intelligence Indexタスクあたりのコスト — 標準価格で$7.76。これは知能を最も安く買う方法ではなく、この指標ではボード全体で最も高価な部類に入り、73件中61位です。

• この指標で消費された出力トークン — 2億500万、中央値は7,280万。Carbonは冗長なモデルで、冗長度ランキングでは下から3番目です。トークン単価は、モデルがより長く考え、より多く書くときにCarbonのワークロードが実際にかかるコストを過小評価します。

• 速度 — 1秒あたり80出力トークン、最初の回答トークンまで66.85秒。同ティアの中央値である12秒と比べると、Carbonはチャットボックスの背後に置くモデルではなく、バッチ処理するモデルです。

• Context — 1M tokens, confirmed both by G​oogle's docs and by the third-party listing.

冗長さと価格を合わせて考えれば、その算術は容赦がない。Carbonで7.76ドルかかるタスクは、安価なオープンウェイトモデルならその約5分の1のコストになる——この比較は、このシリーズの次の記事で詳しく扱う。Carbonの主張は、それが効率的だということではない。サイバーおよび長期的なエージェント作業において、同じ能力を持つ他のものは存在しないかもしれない、ということだ。

これからの20日間で何をするか

節約できる金額の大きい順に、実践的な3つの方法。

まず導入レートでベンチマークし、その結果を12月のレートで価格換算してください。11月の数字を使って11月に下す判断は、どれも実際より100%良く見えます。パイロットが今月$400の月額請求を示しているなら、同じトラフィックは標準ティアでは12月1日から$800になります。

Second, decide whether you need Carbon or whether Argon will do. G​oogle says so itself in the announcement: Argon "remains the ideal choice for the majority of software engineering and knowledge work," and Carbon uses more tokens than Argon to get its answers. The two models share an identical rate card, which means the choice is purely about capability per token spent — and for most workloads the cheaper-per-answer model is Argon.

Third, keep the integration portable. This is where routing earns its keep, and it is worth being precise about what is and is not available today. G​emini 4 Carbon is reached through G​oogle's paid API; it is not in our catalogue, and nothing here should be read as claiming otherwise. G​emini 4 Argon is: google/gemini-4-argon sits on OrcaRouter at G​oogle's own $2 in / $10 out, with the same OpenAI-compatible surface as the other 200-plus models on the key. DeepSeek V4 Pro and Grok 4.7 — the two opponents in this batch — are also there, at $0.66/$1.98 and $2/$6 respectively. Because we pass provider list price through with 0% markup, a vendor rate change is live on our side the day it happens rather than after a repricing cycle — which is the specific thing that matters on 1 December.

その可搬性こそが、11月に特定ベンダーのSDKをハードコードしないことの唯一の根拠だ。Carbonのアクセス条件はこの14日の間にすでに2度変わっている。まず限定公開の発表、次に有料APIだ。料金は12月1日に改定される。価格と入口の両方が動いた月は、単一ベンダーへの依存を築く月ではない。

まだ未知のこと

Two things, and they are the ones to watch rather than the benchmark table. Rate limits are unpublished, so nobody outside G​oogle knows what a production Carbon integration can actually sustain — the 28 October cohort was small enough that throughput was never tested publicly. And the consumer picture is Ultra-only: there is no free path to Carbon and no indication of when there will be. If the model follows Argon's arc, a cheaper sibling will absorb the volume and Carbon will stay the expensive specialist. That is the shape the pricing already implies.