Gemini 4 Argon opens to paying users and tops Vals AI professional work index
Argon left early access for paying customers, scored 68.90% on Vals AI's professional work index ahead of Claude Opus 5.5, supports 1M-token output, and its introductory API price doubles after November 30.
Google opened Gemini 4 Argon to paying customers, and it already leads Vals AI’s index of professional work. Since its September 30 unveiling, Argon had been limited to Google teams, the US government, vetted cyber defenders and early-access partners. One of its big deal is the 1 mn token output context window. Its introductory API price of $2/$10 per 1M input/output tokens doubles to $4 and $20 after November 30. Google ties Argon’s longer runs to a 1M-token budget shared by input and output, while Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview capped output at 64K tokens. Vals AI’s index weights agentic finance, coding, legal and tax tasks by each sector’s share of US GDP, using 6 private benchmarks and 2 public ones. Argon scored 68.90% there, ahead of Claude Sonnet 5.5 at 67.04% and Claude Opus 5.5 at 66.97%. It also ran faster and cheaper, averaging under 47 minutes and $15.68 per test against 1 hour 18 minutes and $21.34 for Sonnet 5.5. Vals priced Argon at the $4 and $20 standard rate Opus 5.5 also charges, yet Opus cost $32.14 per test. Argon’s cost edge therefore comes from using fewer than half Opus’s input tokens, so it should survive the end of the discount.
This post quotes another post: “Sundar Pichai announces global rollout of Gemini 4 Argon”