Key points: Google this week unveiled its latest flagship large model, Gemini 4 Argon, aiming to compete head-to-head with OpenAI and Anthropic in the frontier AI race.

Analysts are bullish on Argon, which has posted top-tier results on benchmark leaderboards.

The new model will be rolled out carefully in stages, starting with cybersecurity partners, but analysts say the real test comes once enterprises deploy it at scale in production.

For Alphabet (ASX: GOOGL), the path through AI in 2026 has been a rollercoaster. It started well. Gemini 3, launched in late 2025, put Google back at the center of the frontier AI conversation. But for most of this year, Anthropic and OpenAI have been the main protagonists of AI breakthroughs. Google clearly hopes the launch of its new flagship model, Gemini 4 Argon, can turn that around.

The frontier AI race

In August, DeepMind, Google's AI lab, saw its original CEO Demis Hassabis step down. At the time, I wrote that the new head, Koray Kavukcuoglu, had a big task: catching up with the two companies led by Sam Altman and Dario Amodei. Now Google claims the model outperforms top products from OpenAI and Anthropic on some benchmarks. On the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index (AAII), a composite evaluation index, Gemini 4 Argon ranks just behind Claude Opus 5.5 and Claude Sonnet 5.5. Tim Law, AI research director at IDC, said: "Benchmarks show that Google's Gemini 4 Argon has advanced reasoning capabilities on key tasks, especially in legal reasoning, finance and other enterprise knowledge work, as well as long-horizon task scenarios." Lian Jie Su, principal analyst at Omdia, believes that although Google "entered cybersecurity and coding late," Gemini 4 brings Google to the AI frontier, with particularly strong performance in cybersecurity.

Cybersecurity

Google is also highlighting this advantage. The company plans a phased rollout of the new model: first opening it to trusted cybersecurity partners, alongside pre-release safety evaluations with the U.S. government. Tulsi Doshi, Google's Gemini product lead, said in an interview: "Launching this way boosts our confidence, and it also lets us get this model, trained to be good at cyber defense, into the hands of security defenders as quickly as possible." Su noted that runaway-risk incidents involving models from OpenAI and Anthropic have created an opening for Google to "position itself as a trusted model supplier, offering safe and reliable AI services." Nick Patience, AI business lead at Futurum Group, said that while Argon makes Google competitive in AI again, the model is not enough to make Google the industry "leader." Tim Law said: "But at least, Gemini 4 Argon has opened a new competitive front in enterprise knowledge work scenarios, where it can hold its own against other top frontier models." Google said in its announcement that the new model is already used internally to optimize memory resources in Google data centers, freeing up hundreds of terabytes of storage without additional hardware purchases; quantum computing researchers have also used the model. But like all new models, the real test comes when it is broadly released and put into real-world use. Google has not yet given a timeline for full public availability. "While Google touts the results of internal deployment cases, the ultimate validation will only be clear after the model is fully released in enterprise production environments," Tim Law said.

An amusing footnote

U.S. President Donald Trump's rebranding of AI as SI (Super Intelligence) had an unexpected, though in some ways predictable, consequence: the small European country of Slovenia saw an "unprecedented surge" in domain registrations, because yes, its national domain suffix is .si. A spokesperson for Register.si, Slovenia's domain registry, told the BBC that 44,000 .si domains were added in September, compared with fewer than 2,000 in August. This is not the first time an AI concept has sparked a domain rush in a small country. The Caribbean island nation of Anguilla has a population of less than 20,000, and in recent years its .ai domain also saw a registration boom.