Google has been playing catch up with OpenAI and Anthropic. Does its new flagship model really compete at the frontier?

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2026 has been a turbulent year for Google's AI hopes and dreams. 

Things started well. Gemini 3, which launched towards the end of 2025, put Google very much in the frontier AI conversation. 

But for much of the rest of this year, it's Anthropic and OpenAI that have been at the forefront of AI advances.

Google will undoubtedly be hoping the release of a new flagship model, Gemini 4 Argon, changes that. 

Samuel Boivin | Nurphoto | Getty Images

The frontier

When Demis Hassabis stepped down as CEO of DeepMind, Google's AI lab, in August, I wrote that new boss Koray Kavukcuoglu was inheriting a race to catch-up with Sam Altman and Dario Amodei's companies.

Now Google has touted the model as performing better than top OpenAI and Anthropic offerings in some benchmarks. 

Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, a composite benchmark score, places Gemini 4 as lagging behind only Claude Opus 5.5 and Claude Sonnet 5.5 on its leaderboard.

"Google Gemini 4 Argon shows advanced reasoning on critical tasks, according to benchmarks, particularly legal reasoning, finance and other aspects of enterprise knowledge work, including long-running tasks," Tim Law, director of research for AI at IDC, told me. 

Lian Jye Su, chief analyst at Omdia, said that while Google was "late to the cybersecurity and coding game," Gemini 4 took the company to the frontier in AI, particularly in cybersecurity. 

Cybersecurity

Google has been keen to talk up that point. 

The company plans to launch the new model in phases, starting with trusted cybersecurity partners while working with the U.S. government on pre-release safety evaluations.

"Starting this rollout in this way gives us more confidence, but also enables us to put a model that is trained and strong in cyber defense in the hands of defenders as soon as possible," Tulsee Doshi, Google's Gemini model product lead, told CNBC.

News edit

One more thing

Its domain: .ai.