Google

Google brings the deepest infrastructure advantage to the AI race. Their Gemini 2.5 Pro offers a 1 million token context window, and their Flash models deliver some of the lowest per-token pricing available. At Google I/O 2026 on May 19, Google shipped Gemini 3.5 Flash, the first Flash-tier release that beats the previous Pro flagship on agentic coding suites at roughly 4x the throughput, alongside Gemini Spark, a general-purpose agent that reasons across connected apps. At Google Cloud Next '26 in Las Vegas on April 22, 2026, Google launched the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform (the evolution of Vertex AI), backed by a $750 million partner fund, and announced that Gemini will power the next generation of Apple's Siri. On July 21, 2026 Google shipped three models in a single announcement: Gemini 3.6 Flash at $1.50/$7.50 per 1M tokens (a cut from the $9.00 output rate on 3.5 Flash), Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite at $0.30/$2.50 and 350 output tokens per second, and Gemini 3.5 Flash Cyber, a vulnerability-finding model restricted to governments and trusted partners through the CodeMender agent. The framing was efficiency rather than capability: Artificial Analysis scored 3.6 Flash flat at 50 on its Intelligence Index, identical to 3.5 Flash, while measured time per task fell from 2.7 minutes to 1.3 and cost per task from $0.59 to $0.50. The same post confirmed that Gemini 3.5 Pro is still only testing with partners after missing its July 17 target, and that pre-training has begun on Gemini 4, which Google calls its most ambitious run yet. Three weeks later, on August 13, 2026, Google shipped Gemini 3.7 Flash at $0.75/$3.75 per 1M tokens through December 31, 2026, exactly half the rate 3.6 Flash launched at, with DeepSWE v1.1 rising from 48.6 to 65.3 percent and Terminal-bench 2.1 at 85.8. Gemini 3.5 Pro remained unreleased after slipping past an August 6 target as well, so the pattern is now explicit: Google is iterating the cheap tier on a roughly three-week cadence at falling prices while the flagship stays in partner testing. On September 2, 2026 Google shipped Gemini 3.8 Flash and kept the $0.75/$3.75 rate, but this time it printed the expiry: the introductory price runs through December 31, 2026 and both sides double to $1.50/$7.50 on January 1, 2027, with Batch and Flex at half and Priority at 1.8x. The model takes text, image, audio, video, and PDF with a 1,048,576 token context and 65,536 output tokens, Artificial Analysis measures GPQA Diamond at 95.3 for the high tier, and Google reports SWE-bench Pro at 61.6. A Cyber variant shipped alongside it behind Fairwind gating, repeating the 3.5 Flash Cyber pattern. Google has since moved Gemini 3.6 Flash onto the same $0.75/$3.75 schedule through December 31, 2026, and it shut Gemini 2.0 Flash down on the Gemini API on June 1, 2026. Backed by custom TPU hardware and decades of ML research (Transformer architecture was invented at Google), they compete on both the frontier and the budget ends of the market.