Alphabet The stock price rose by about 2.3%. Previously, Google released Gemini 4 Argon, which is a new flagship artificial intelligence model designed to compete more directly with the most advanced systems of OpenAI and Anthropic.

Google indicates that Gemini 4 Argon is aimed at complex, long-running professional workloads, covering software engineering, financial research, legal work, and cybersecurity. The model will initially be open to trusted cybersecurity partners, and then more broadly launched to developers, enterprises, and consumers.

This release has brought a new AI catalyst for Alphabet. The delays in the preceding months had dampened investors' confidence.

Gemini directly targets OpenAI and Anthropic.

Google is positioning Argon as a competitor to OpenAI in the Astra and Anthropic areas, at the forefront of the AI market.

The company stated that its internal benchmark tests show that Argon can compete with its competitors in various programming and network security tests, and even performs better; however, Reuters pointed out that it still lags behind its competitors in some programming tasks.

The arrival of Gemini 4 also coincided with Google abandoning the release of Gemini 3.5 Pro. The product has experienced repeated delays, and in July, Alphabet, its stock price fell by more than 4%.

This makes Argon more than just a routine model update. In fact, it is an attempt by Google to reset the roadmap for its flagship AI as OpenAI and Anthropic continue to launch more powerful systems.

Google also competes in terms of cost.

Performance is just a part of the strategy.

The pricing for Gemini 4 Argon is token dollars per million inputs and token dollars per million outputs. This also allows Google to challenge high-end AI products in a different way, as the importance of model costs for corporate customers is continuously increasing.

This pricing pressure is in line with the broader AI token price war, which has previously driven down the reasoning costs of the entire industry significantly.

Alphabet also possesses advantages that the independent AI laboratory does not have: Google can be distributed through Search, Cloud, Workspace, Android as well as its developer ecosystem. Earlier this year, strong AI and cloud business growth helped Google's stock price reach a record high.