❯ Google releases Gemini 4 Argon, which ties GPT-6 Astra in independent tests with under a third of its hallucination rate

Cyber defenders firstGoogle DeepMind released its new frontier model, Gemini 4 Argon, built for complex coding, enterprise knowledge work such as law and finance, and cybersecurity defense. It is rolling out first to governments and trusted cybersecurity teams; Google says it will strengthen its systems using early tester feedback before opening access more widely as soon as possible.

A dead heat with AstraIndependent evaluator Artificial Analysis found Argon (high reasoning) matches GPT-6 Astra (max) on its Intelligence Index, with a hallucination rate of just 15% versus 51% for Astra. The hallucination rate measures how often a model makes things up when it doesn’t know the answer. Argon can also output up to 1 million tokens in a single response, about 8x the cap of Astra and Claude Opus 5.5, suiting very long multi-step tasks done in one go.

Questions beyond benchmarksAccording to Bloomberg, some Google employees say Argon scores well on benchmarks but struggles with some real-world coding tasks; Google disputes that. Limiting it to a few security customers at first also shows how cautious Google is about misuse of highly capable models, echoing Anthropic’s restricted release of Mythos Preview.

A three-way race againOver the past year, the frontier lead has mostly traded between OpenAI and Anthropic. Argon puts Google back in the top tier, giving companies another comparable option for their main model. A low hallucination rate is especially appealing where wrong answers are costly, like law and finance, and it is Google’s opening to take on both rivals’ enterprise business.

▪ SIGNALWhen overall scores tie, saying fewer wrong things may win over high-paying enterprise customers more than getting one more question right.