Gemini 4 Carbon was announced two weeks earlier for "a subset of cyber defenders", and as of 10.11.2026 it is available to everyone else.
Author Simon Willison describes it as Google's best ever Gemini. It is priced at launch at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, which Willison notes is in line with GPT-6.1 Sol and Claude Sonnet 5.5 prices. The price is scheduled to double to $4 per million input and $20 per million output on 01.12.2026, which he notes matches Opus 5.5.
Willison generated three pelicans at the low, medium and high thinking effort settings; the model defaults to medium. He observes that Gemini pelicans have all been great for a while, so he also tested the model using Google's Antigravity IDE with a prompt he had first tried with Claude Fable 5.2 on 09.11.2026:
Make a three js animation where yonkers stands up as a big mech (cool stand up motion) and stomps around manhattan and queens and Brooklyn, use openstreetmap mapping data
He reports that he had to prompt "build that into a standalone HTML file" to get a version with no external dependencies, and then screen-captured the result as a video.
In an update, Willison notes a video on YouTube that was also tweeted by Sundar Pichai: using Google Antigravity's /swarm feature, Carbon built an open-world 3D game in which the player explores Google's Mountain View campus as a pelican riding a GBike. According to the description, the work involved coordinating subagents to model 3D assets in Blender from Omni and Nano Banana references, building the browser game in Three.js with WebGL shaders, and pairing procedural Web Audio sound effects with Lyria music. A playable version is available in AI Studio.