Google has released a new AI model called Gemini 4 Hydrogen, and most people can start using it today. It is rolling out to Google Search and to the Gemini app, including the free version. The company says it completes tasks 2.5 times faster than the model it replaces.
Google introduced Gemini 4 Hydrogen on November 12, 2026. The announcement was written by Koray Kavukcuoglu, senior vice president of Google DeepMind and chief AI architect at Google. Gemini 4 comes in three models. Carbon and Argon are built for deep reasoning on long, complex tasks. Hydrogen is built for rapid execution across agentic workflows, meaning AI tasks with many steps and tool calls. Hydrogen is available to everyone. That includes all tiers of Google AI Studio, the Gemini API, Gemini for business, the Gemini app, and Google Search. Paid Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers can also use it in Google’s Antigravity coding tool.
You can try Hydrogen now without paying, through the Gemini app or Google Search. Developers who use the Gemini API pay by the token, a small piece of text the model reads or writes. Hydrogen costs $1.50 per million input tokens and $7.50 per million output tokens. That price stays flat across the full 1 million-token context window, which is how much text the model can handle at one time. For comparison, Google’s Argon model costs $2 and $10 until its introductory pricing ends on November 30, then moves to $4 and $20. The per-token price puts Hydrogen in a crowded market where rival models have also competed on cost.
Hydrogen scored 51 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index at its default high thinking level. That puts it one point ahead of Argon, which scored 50. Thinking level describes how much work the model does before it replies. Hydrogen has four levels: low, medium, high, and a new fourth level called xhigh. At xhigh, Hydrogen scores 54 on the same index.
Against Gemini 3.8 Flash, which came out in September, Hydrogen finished tasks 2.5 times faster at the default setting. On the Terminal-Bench 4.1 test, Hydrogen scored 57 percent. Gemini 3.8 Flash scored 18.2 percent. Google says fabricated claims, meaning statements the AI makes up and presents as fact, were cut by more than five times.
New tools and safety claims
Google also added a feature called Orchestrator to Antigravity. It switches between Carbon and Hydrogen inside a single session. On the Terminal-Bench 4.0 coding test, Orchestrator reached near-Carbon success rates. It did that while using 24 percent less quota and finishing 19 percent faster.
Hydrogen also skipped a testing stage that Argon went through. Argon spent nearly two weeks with members of Google’s Fairwind Program, a group of vetted cybersecurity defenders, before paying developers could use it on October 13. Hydrogen opened to everyone at once, including people on the free version of the Gemini app, as SiliconANGLE reported.
Andrew Carr, chief scientist and co-founder of Cartwheel, said: “We have been working on a thorny problem for 10 days with frontier models from competitors and the Hydrogen model was able to catch 2 issues with our approach and proposed a fix.” SiliconANGLE notes that Carr is a former OpenAI scientist.
Google also reported safety figures. Overreach in agentic tasks, meaning the AI going beyond what it was asked to do, fell by up to 81 percent. Under-service, meaning the AI doing too little of the job, fell by up to 79 percent. Misaligned actions and task shortcutting were cut by 12 times. On an internal honesty test, Hydrogen scored a 94 percent honesty rate. Across more than 200,000 audited turns, 99.9 percent of its chain-of-thought, the step-by-step reasoning behind its answers, was legible to auditors. On the Gray Swan benchmark, Hydrogen was 2.3 times more resilient against indirect prompt injection, an attack where hidden instructions in content try to trick an AI.
The release matters for Alphabet, Google’s parent company, which faces questions over the return on its AI spending. It also lands in classrooms where some universities started rethinking how they teach. Governments are now writing rules for the technology, including a British push on AI oversight.
Is Gemini 4 Hydrogen free to use? Yes, for most people. Hydrogen is rolling out to Google Search for all users and to the Gemini app, including the free tier. Paid Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers can also use it in Google Antigravity. Developers using the Gemini API pay per token.
Gemini 4 Hydrogen is available today in Google Search and the Gemini app, including the free tier, and to developers through the Gemini API at $1.50 per million input tokens and $7.50 per million output tokens.
