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Google's Argon AI Goes Global with $2 Token Price

Google's Argon AI Goes Global with $2 Token Price

Google announced Tuesday that its flagship AI model, Argon, is now available to developers and enterprise customers worldwide. Previously, only a select group of cybersecurity professionals could access it through Google's Fairwind program.

The phased rollout balances security assessments with commercial ambitions—a sign that Google is cautiously expanding access to cutting-edge AI while keeping risks in check.

Where You Can Get It

Argon is now offered through the Google AI Studio API, the Google AI Ultra and Pro subscription services in the Gemini App, and the intelligent agent development platform Antigravity.

Pricing starts at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens. But here's the catch: prices double starting in December. Even after the hike, Argon remains cheaper than OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra, which costs $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output tokens.

The Coding Question

Despite the competitive pricing, some Google employees reportedly have doubts about Argon's performance in areas like coding. That skepticism hasn't stopped Google DeepMind head Koray Kavukcuoglu from singing its praises.

Kavukcuoglu said internal software engineers have used Argon to deliver high-quality code faster, and the model has also been used to optimize the Chrome user experience. "We want to demonstrate the model's value in real engineering tasks," he said.

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From Sandbags to Robots

Argon combines multimodal reasoning, agent coding, and physical understanding capabilities. According to Kavukcuoglu, that could advance embodied robotics research.

In one demo, researchers reconstructed scene layouts and motion trajectories from videos of humans throwing sandbags. They passed the computational results to a humanoid robot, which then hit the target seven times in a row in a real environment.

Key Points

  • Global access: Argon is now available to paying users worldwide via Google AI Studio, Gemini App subscriptions, and Antigravity.
  • Pricing: $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens—doubling in December.
  • Competitive edge: Still cheaper than OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra.
  • Mixed reviews: Some Google employees question Argon's coding performance.
  • Real-world wins: Internal engineers use it for faster coding, and a robot demo shows promise in embodied AI.

As Google opens Argon to the world, the real test will be whether developers embrace it—or stick with rivals.