Alphabet shares up in premarket trade after Gemini 4 Argon launch

Investing.com -- Alphabet Inc Class A (NASDAQ: GOOGL) shares rose about 2% in premarket trading on Thursday after Google launched a new artificial intelligence model, Gemini 4 Argon, touting stronger coding and cybersecurity performance than rival models at lower prices.

Google said Gemini 4 Argon will initially be available to a group of trusted cybersecurity researchers before being rolled out more broadly.

The company said paid API customers and Google AI Ultra subscribers will get access first, with wider availability for developers, businesses and consumers to follow.

Jefferies analysts said the model’s launch pricing of $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens was well below comparable offerings from Anthropic.

Claude Fable 5.1 is priced at $10 and $50, respectively, while Claude Opus 5.5 costs $4 and $20. Google is also offering a 95% discount on cached input tokens.

Google said Gemini 4 Argon scored 77.9% on the DeepSWE v1.1 coding benchmark, a record result. Jefferies noted that it trails leading models on the more demanding FrontierSWE v2 test, but said the model ranked first for coding on LLM Arena’s Text Arena. It also ranked eighth on Code Arena: Web Dev, 21 places higher than Gemini 3.8 Flash.

The model’s cybersecurity capabilities could be another area of focus for investors. Google said Argon can identify, verify and fix software vulnerabilities autonomously.

Jefferies said it tied Grok 4.7 for the top score of 68% on CWE-bench v1, which tests vulnerability fixes.

Google also said Argon had a lower success rate for prompt-injection attacks, at 0.7%, compared with 1% for Claude Opus 5.5 and Fable 5.1, according to Jefferies.

For its initial cybersecurity rollout, Google said it will provide the model without some of its usual safeguards to trusted defenders and internal teams. Cybersecurity firm Wiz is using Argon through its Scan for Good programme, Google said.

Google said the model also performed strongly on tests covering automation, long-form video and professional work across areas such as finance, legal services and tax. Its output limit has been increased to 1 million tokens from 64,000, compared with 128,000 for Anthropic’s rival models, according to Jefferies.

The company said it is already using Argon internally for tasks including software development and data-centre optimisation, although these claims have yet to be independently established as evidence of broader commercial adoption.

Jefferies rates Alphabet "buy" with a $445 price target. The brokerage said the stock had fallen 16% from its May 18 peak as investors worried Alphabet could fall behind rivals while awaiting Gemini 4 Pro.

Jefferies cautioned that real-world use will need to validate the early benchmark results, adding that the systems used to run and evaluate AI models are becoming increasingly important to performance, rather than the models alone.

Google said it plans to strengthen safeguards before wider release, including monitoring the model for signs of misuse and intervening when necessary to prevent harmful actions.

Original Article

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