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Google's Argon AI Model Goes Global, Priced at $2 per Million Input Tokens

Google's Argon AI Model Opens to Global Developers

Google announced on Tuesday that its flagship AI model, Argon, is now available to developers and enterprise customers worldwide. Previously, it was only offered to a select group of trusted cybersecurity professionals through Google's Fairwind program. This phased release balances security assessments with commercial promotion, highlighting the importance of risk control when expanding access to cutting-edge models.

Currently, Argon is available to paying users through the Google AI Studio API, Google AI Ultra and Pro subscription services in the Gemini App, and the intelligent agent development platform Antigravity. Its pricing is $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, with prices doubling starting in December.

Even after the price increase, it remains cheaper than OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra, which costs $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output tokens. However, according to reports, some Google employees still have doubts about Argon's performance in areas such as coding.

Koray Kavukcuoglu, head of Google DeepMind, said that internal software engineers have used Argon to deliver high-quality code more quickly, and the model has also been used to optimize the user experience of Chrome. Google hopes to demonstrate the value of the model in real engineering tasks. Kavukcuoglu also said that Argon, combining multimodal reasoning, agent coding, and physical understanding capabilities, has the potential to advance embodied robotics research.

In one demonstration, researchers reconstructed the scene layout and motion trajectory from videos of humans throwing sandbags and passed the computational results to a humanoid robot, which then hit the target seven times consecutively in a real environment.

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Key Points

  • Global availability: Argon is now open to developers and enterprises worldwide after a limited release.
  • Pricing: $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, doubling in December.
  • Competitive edge: Cheaper than OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra, but internal doubts remain about coding performance.
  • Real-world applications: Used internally for coding and Chrome optimization; potential in robotics demonstrated by a humanoid robot hitting a target seven times in a row.