Google launches Gemini 4 Hydrogen, its fast agent model, at $1.50/$7.50 per million tokens

Google spent the morning saying nothing about Gemini 4 Hydrogen. Its billing catalog did the talking instead: the unannounced model’s name and full prices turned up in Google Cloud’s SKU list, and by early afternoon the leak-tracking corners of Reddit were treating a launch as a matter of hours. They were right. By mid-afternoon Google had confirmed it — Hydrogen is real, it is the fast, agent-focused member of the Gemini 4 family, and it is available starting today.

The confirmation came in a blog post from Koray Kavukcuoglu, SVP at Google DeepMind and Chief AI Architect at Google, published November 12, alongside a model card on DeepMind’s site dated the same day. “Today, we’re introducing Gemini 4 Hydrogen,” the post says, and “starting today, Hydrogen is rolling out globally” — in the Gemini app, Google AI Studio, the Gemini API and Vertex AI, Gemini for business, Google Antigravity, Google Search, and Gemini in Google Sheets. The pricing matches the leaked catalog exactly: $1.50 per million input tokens and $7.50 per million output tokens, flat across the model’s 1M-token context window.

What Google actually announced#

Hydrogen is adapted from Gemini 4 Carbon, the flagship-tier model that went generally available on November 10 — but it is built for a different job. Where Carbon is the strongest model in the family, Hydrogen is the one meant to run all day: agentic coding, long multi-step tasks, and the kind of background work where speed and price matter more than squeezing out the last point of capability. The model card describes a 1M-token unified context window, up to 64K tokens of synchronous output by default (and up to 1M via background generation), and configurable thinking effort, with high as the default and a higher-effort setting above it.

That positioning is the whole point of the Gemini 4 naming scheme. Argon, announced September 30, is the frontier model. Carbon, announced October 28, is the top-tier workhorse. Hydrogen, at $1.50/$7.50, is the Flash-tier successor — priced exactly where Gemini 3.8 Flash sits, and well below Carbon’s December pricing of $4 input and $20 output per million tokens. Google is not asking developers to choose between one model and another; it is pricing a ladder, and Hydrogen is the bottom rung you actually run at scale.

The numbers that matter#

Google’s model card publishes a full benchmark table, and it is refreshingly honest about where Hydrogen wins and where it does not. The standout is Terminal-Bench 4.1, the agentic coding benchmark: Hydrogen scores 57.0%, against 18.2% for Gemini 3.8 Flash — the model it replaces — though it trails Claude Sonnet 5.5’s 63.9%. The same pattern shows up on OSWorld, the computer-use benchmark, where Hydrogen’s 77.6% sits behind Sonnet 5.5’s 83.9%. On the tests where it leads, it leads clearly: SWE-sweep at 13.5% against Sonnet 5.5’s 3.1% and GPT-6.1 Terra’s 5.8%, Agents’ Last Exam at 71.6%, and AutomationBench-AA at 76.1%.

The blog adds one more number: on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, Hydrogen scores 51 at default high thinking — one point ahead of Argon’s 50 — and 54 at maximum thinking effort. The fair reading of the table is the one a top Reddit comment made within minutes of the model card appearing: this is the fast model, not the pro model. It wins the races it is built for and concedes the ones it is not.

From rumor to release in one morning#

The speed of the confirmation is part of the story. This morning the model existed only as 30 line items in a billing catalog and a screenshot of the Antigravity model picker. By 1:04 p.m. ET, a post on r/singularity linking the DeepMind model card was climbing fast, with commenters already picking through the benchmark table. Google’s announcement landed the same afternoon, turning a rumor into a release inside a single news cycle — the third Gemini 4 model in six weeks, and the second launch in three days after Carbon’s general availability on November 10.

There is still a second codename in the mix: Krypton, described by trackers as a checkpoint above Carbon. It has no billing entry, no model card, and no announcement, and it is worth mentioning only so the two names do not get confused. Hydrogen is confirmed. Krypton is not.

What Google hasn’t shown yet#

One document is still missing: the full Safety & Security Report for Hydrogen, which the model card says “will be available in the coming days.” For a model built to run agents autonomously — and priced to be run constantly — that report matters more than usual, and its absence is the main thing to watch. The model card also leaves the usual open questions: how the flat $1.50/$7.50 pricing holds up under sustained agentic workloads, and whether the benchmark leads survive contact with real developer tasks rather than curated suites.

What to watch#

Three things, in order. First, the safety report — when it lands, read what it says about autonomous agent behavior, not just the headline. Second, independent benchmarks: the model-card numbers favor Hydrogen on agentic tests, but the first third-party runs will show whether the Terminal-Bench and SWE-sweep leads hold outside Google’s harness. Third, Krypton: if a fourth Gemini 4 name surfaces in the billing catalog the way Hydrogen did, the family — and the pricing ladder — is not finished yet.

Sources: Google — Introducing Gemini 4 Hydrogen (Nov. 12, 2026); Google DeepMind — Gemini 4 Hydrogen model card (published Nov. 12, 2026); Google Cloud — Model Garden pricing (Gemini 4 Hydrogen, $1.50/$7.50 per million tokens); r/singularity — Google releases Gemini 4 Hydrogen (Nov. 12, 2026, 1:04 p.m. ET). Prior coverage: RUMOR: Unannounced Gemini 4 Hydrogen appears in Google Cloud’s price list; Gemini 4 Carbon is now available to everyone — and Google’s /swarm turns one prompt into a team of agents.