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Google's Argon AI Opens to All, But Pricing Takes a Leap

Google announced 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 rollout balances security assessments with commercial ambitions, highlighting the importance of risk control when expanding access to cutting-edge models.

Starting now, paying users can access Argon via the Google AI Studio API, Google AI Ultra and Pro subscription services in the Gemini App, and the intelligent agent development platform Antigravity. The pricing? $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. However, some Google employees reportedly have doubts about Argon's performance in areas like coding.

Koray Kavukcuoglu, head of Google DeepMind, said 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 model's value in real engineering tasks. Kavukcuoglu also noted 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.

Key Points:

  • Google's Argon model is now globally available to developers and enterprises.
  • Pricing starts at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, doubling in December.
  • Argon undercuts OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra on price.
  • Google DeepMind highlights Argon's use in coding, Chrome optimization, and robotics research.
  • A demo showed a robot learning from human video to throw sandbags with high accuracy.