LAHORE MIRROR (AFP/reuters) –Alphabet’s Google on Wednesday announced a new top-tier artificial intelligence (AI) model, “Argon”, to anchor its Gemini 4 generation of models in a fresh bid to catch up to rivals Anthropic and OpenAI in the AI race.
However, Google said it would withhold the model from the public for now, releasing Gemini 4 Argon only to a vetted group of cybersecurity experts to avoid misuse by hackers.
“Safely releasing frontier capabilities at this level requires a phased approach,” wrote Koray Kavukcuoglu, Google’s chief AI architect, in a blog post announcing the model.
The new model is larger in size than Google’s previous line of advanced “Pro” models, a company spokesperson said.
“It’s our most performant model yet built for complex workloads, and we see it comparable to frontier models like [OpenAI’s] Astra and [Anthropic’s] Opus on key coding and cyber benchmarks,” the spokesperson said.
View this post on Instagram
Google said it was providing the model to select cybersecurity partners and was participating in the Trump administration’s voluntary process for pre-release model access. It did not provide a timeline for the model’s public release.
The model posted better marks than OpenAI’s Astra and Anthropic’s Opus in terms of self-reported performance on several industry benchmarks, per a company press release.
Still, Argon remained behind on certain other metrics, including two of the four coding-related benchmarks Google included in the release.
Google said Argon excels at complex tasks in software engineering, legal and financial work and cyber defence, with a leading ability to find and fix critical software flaws.
Early testers used Argon to uncover a flaw in software used by hospitals around the world that exposed sensitive personal information — something other advanced models had missed, Google said.
Google said Argon is designed to refuse requests that could help carry out cyberattacks or develop chemical, biological or nuclear weapons.
Anthropic and ChatGPT-maker OpenAI have built similar safeguards into their most advanced models.
