Alphabet’s Google on Wednesday announced a new top-tier artificial intelligence (AI) model, “Argon”, to anchor its Gemini 4 generation of models in a fresh bid to catch up to rivals Anthropic and OpenAI in the AI race.

However, Google said it would withhold the model from the public for now, releasing Gemini 4 Argon only to a vetted group of cybersecurity experts to avoid misuse by hackers.

“Safely releasing frontier capabilities at this level requires a phased approach,” wrote Koray Kavukcuoglu, Google’s chief AI architect, in a blog post announcing the model.

The new model is larger in size than Google’s previous line of advanced “Pro” models, a company spokesperson said.

“It’s our most performant model yet built for complex workloads, and we see it comparable to frontier models like [OpenAI’s] Astra and [Anthropic’s] Opus on key coding and cyber benchmarks,” the spokesperson said.

Google said it was providing the model to select cybersecurity partners and was participating in the Trump administration’s voluntary process for pre-release model access. It did not provide a timeline for the model’s public release.

The model posted better marks than OpenAI’s Astra and Anthropic’s Opus in terms of self-reported performance on several industry benchmarks, per a company press release.

Still, Argon remained behind on certain other metrics, including two of the four coding-related benchmarks Google included in the release.

Google said Argon excels at complex tasks in software engineering, legal and financial work and cyber defence, with a leading ability to find and fix critical software flaws.

Early testers used Argon to uncover a flaw in software used by hospitals around the world that exposed sensitive personal information — something other advanced models had missed, Google said.

Google said Argon is designed to refuse requests that could help carry out cyberattacks or develop chemical, biological or nuclear weapons.

Anthropic and ChatGPT-maker OpenAI have built similar safeguards into their most advanced models.

Cautious rollout

Wednesday’s announcement came a day after United States President Donald Trump hosted top tech executives, including Google chief Sundar Pichai and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, at the White House, where they signed a voluntary accord pledging to police the risks of their own AI systems.

Cybersecurity experts fear the state-of-the-art technology could be used to hack banks, hospitals and government systems.

The cautious rollout mirrors the approach of rival Anthropic, which has kept its most advanced model, Claude Mythos Preview, restricted to a small number of trusted organisations.

Washington briefly forced Anthropic to suspend access to its publicly released Claude Mythos and Claude Fable models in June, and has since set up a voluntary process for vetting the most powerful AI models before release.

Google said it is monitoring the model’s reasoning to stop it from straying beyond what users intended, a risk researchers call misalignment.

The issue has taken on new urgency since OpenAI disclosed in July that two of its models, including one not yet released, broke out of a sealed test environment during a cybersecurity evaluation and hacked into the servers of AI company Hugging Face.

Meanwhile, Google no longer plans to release Gemini 3.5 Pro, which CEO Sundar Pichai originally said would be released in June, according to the company spokesperson.

In the intervening time, Google overhauled its DeepMind AI lab, with its founder and CEO Demis Hassabis stepping aside and several leaders of its Gemini model leaving the company.

The months of delays to its AI model have caused the company to fall behind Anthropic and OpenAI, which continued to push the research frontier with new releases to its top models.

Pichai in July pushed back on the notion that Google was losing ground in the AI race.

But Google in recent months has shifted its messaging from touting Gemini’s cutting-edge capabilities to highlighting its cost advantage compared to competitor models.