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Google's Argon AI Opens Up: $2 Per Million Tokens, But Not Everyone's Cheering

Google announced Tuesday that its flagship AI model, Argon, is now available to developers and enterprise customers around the globe. 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 promotion, reflecting the importance of risk control when expanding access to cutting-edge models.

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Where You Can Get It and What It Costs

Argon is now 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. Pricing starts at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens. Starting in December, those prices will double.

Even after the price hike, Argon remains cheaper than OpenAI's GPT-6Astra, 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.

Google's Pitch: Real Engineering Value

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 model's value 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.

Key Points

  • Global access: Argon is now available 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: Still cheaper than OpenAI's GPT-6Astra.
  • Internal skepticism: Some Google employees question Argon's coding performance.
  • Real-world use: Google engineers use Argon for coding and Chrome optimization; robotics demos show promise.