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Last updated: November 13, 2026
What is Gemini 4 Hydrogen? Gemini 4 Hydrogen is Google's fast execution model for everyday coding and agents, released on November 12, 2026 at $1.50 per million input tokens and $7.50 per million output tokens, flat across its 1M-token window. It edges Gemini 4 Argon on Artificial Analysis, but its agent security claims are mostly relative to Gemini 3.8 Flash, so enterprises should test it before deploying.
TL;DR: Key Takeaways
- Flat price: $1.50 input and $7.50 output per million tokens, with no introductory promotion, which is twice Gemini 3.8 Flash's introductory rate (VentureBeat).
- Independent score of 51 to 54: Artificial Analysis rates Hydrogen 51 at high for $1.87 per task and 54 at xhigh for $3.16, against 55 for Claude Sonnet 5.5 at $10.02 (Artificial Analysis).
- Google's table favors Hydrogen on seven of ten rows against Sonnet 5.5 and GPT-6.1 Terra, but Sonnet 5.5 leads Terminal-Bench 4.1, OSWorld-2.1 and Terminal-Bench-Science (Google).
- xhigh is fast but verbose: 13.7 minutes per task, yet 304M output tokens on the index against a median of 72.8M (Artificial Analysis).
- It sits beside Carbon and Argon, not above them: Carbon scores 60 on the same index, and Antigravity's Orchestrator pairs the two (Google).
- Security claims are relative: 12x fewer misaligned actions and 2.3x better injection resilience, with no absolute attack rate (Google).
Gemini 4 Hydrogen at a Glance
Gemini 4 Hydrogen is a reasoning model with four thinking levels (low, medium, high by default and xhigh), a window of about 1M tokens and flat pricing of $1.50 and $7.50 per million tokens. Google positions it below Gemini 4 Carbon and Argon as the fast execution model, and above Gemini 3.8 Flash on speed and intelligence.
| Spec | Gemini 4 Hydrogen | Gemini 3.8 Flash | Gemini 4 Carbon |
|---|---|---|---|
| Input / output price per 1M tokens | $1.50 / $7.50, flat | $0.75 / $3.75 through Dec 31, 2026, then $1.50 / $7.50 | $2 / $10 introductory, then $4 / $20 |
| Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index (high) | 51 | 31 | 60 |
| Availability | Everyone: API, Gemini app, Search; Antigravity for paid plans | Still listed, no shutdown date | Paying developers, businesses and Ultra since Nov 10 |
Source: VentureBeat, Artificial Analysis and The Next Web (2026). Hydrogen takes text, image, speech and video input and returns text. Google rolled it out on November 12 to the Gemini API, Google AI Studio, Gemini for business, the Gemini app, Google Search and Gemini in Sheets, and VentureBeat reports that Google Cloud lists gemini-4-hydrogen as generally available.
How we researched
On November 13, 2026 we read Google's launch and developer posts, the benchmark table image, VentureBeat's launch report and the Artificial Analysis pages for Hydrogen and Claude Sonnet 5.5. Scores are labeled vendor-reported or independent, and we ran no tests of our own. We could not read the model card PDF as text, so safety figures come from Google's blog.
What Changed From Gemini 3.8 Flash
Hydrogen changes four things from Gemini 3.8 Flash: much higher agent scores, about 2.5 times faster task completion at the default level, fewer fabricated claims and a higher price. Google reports Terminal-Bench 4.1 rising from 18.2% to 57%, while the token price is twice Flash's introductory rate through December 31.
| Change | What is reported |
|---|---|
| Speed | 2.5x faster at the default high level; partners report 2x to 2.8x on data-heavy workflows |
| Agent coding | Terminal-Bench 4.1: 57% against 18.2% for Flash |
| Reliability | Fabricated claims cut by more than 5x; better recovery from failed tool calls (Google) |
| Independent score | Index 51 at high against 31 for Flash at high; $1.87 against $7.77 per task (Artificial Analysis, via VentureBeat) |
| Price | $1.50 / $7.50 against $0.75 / $3.75 until December 31; Flash returns to $1.50 / $7.50 on January 1, 2027 (VentureBeat) |
According to VentureBeat (2026), Google's deprecation schedule lists no shutdown date for Flash, so migration is optional. The per-token price doubles, yet Artificial Analysis estimates a lower cost per task because Flash needed more time and tokens. Box reported its Complex Work Eval rising from 74% to 79% in early access, with 12% fewer tokens.
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Gemini 4 Hydrogen Benchmarks: What Google Reports
Google's launch table puts Gemini 4 Hydrogen ahead of Claude Sonnet 5.5 and GPT-6.1 Terra on seven of ten rows, and behind Sonnet 5.5 on three: Terminal-Bench 4.1, OSWorld-2.1 and Terminal-Bench-Science. These are vendor-reported scores, so verify them on your own tasks first.
| Benchmark | Gemini 4 Hydrogen | Claude Sonnet 5.5 | GPT-6.1 Terra |
|---|---|---|---|
| SWE-sweep | 13.5% | 3.1% | 5.8% |
| Terminal-Bench 4.1 (cheating-adjusted) | 57.0% | 63.9% | not reported |
| Agents' Last Exam v1.1 | 71.6% | 60.4% | 69.8% |
| AutomationBench-AA | 76.1% | 71.8% | 60.2% |
| Vending-Bench 2 (bank balance) | $14,549 | $11,165 | $9,107 |
| OSWorld-2.1 (offline subset) | 77.6% | 83.9% | 74.2% |
| MKA (Climb WSR accuracy) | 53.4% | 52.0% | 43.8% |
| Chartography | 66.6% | 61.6% | 63.2% |
| Terminal-Bench-Science 0.1 | 51.4% | 59.9% | 58.3% |
| HLE-Diamond | 58.8% | 53.3% | 47.3% |
Source: Google launch post, benchmark table (2026). Google links a methodology page for evaluation settings.
According to Google (2026), Hydrogen's clearest leads are SWE-sweep, AutomationBench-AA at 76.1% and HLE-Diamond at 58.8%. Sonnet 5.5 wins where agents work in a terminal or on a desktop, by 6.9 points on Terminal-Bench 4.1, 6.3 on OSWorld-2.1 and 8.5 on Terminal-Bench-Science.
Two cautions apply. Google chose the rivals: the table has no Claude Fable 5.2, Opus 5.5 or Gemini 4 Carbon, so it shows Hydrogen against its price class. And AutomationBench-AA is not the AutomationBench in Anthropic's table, so do not compare it with the figures in our Claude Sonnet 5.5 analysis.
Independent Results and Cost per Task
Artificial Analysis scores Gemini 4 Hydrogen at 51 on its Intelligence Index at the default high level and 54 at xhigh, close to Claude Sonnet 5.5 at 55 but at far lower cost. High costs $1.87 per task and takes 7.9 minutes; xhigh costs $3.16 and takes 13.7 minutes.
| Model (effort) | Index score | Cost per task | Time per task |
|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Fable 5.2 (max) | 65 | $26.54 | 46.8 min |
| Gemini 4 Carbon (high) | 60 | $5.48 | 28.4 min |
| Claude Opus 5.5 (max) | 59 | $10.04 | 25.2 min |
| GPT-6 Astra (max) | 57 | $6.24 | 24.2 min |
| GPT-6.1 Sol (max) | 55 | $1.27 | 23.3 min |
| Claude Sonnet 5.5 (max) | 55 | $10.02 | 34.1 min |
| Gemini 4 Hydrogen (xhigh) | 54 | $3.16 | 13.7 min |
| Gemini 4 Hydrogen (high) | 51 | $1.87 | 7.9 min |
Source: Artificial Analysis, Intelligence Index v5.0.1, November 13, 2026.
According to Artificial Analysis (2026), xhigh is very verbose: it produced 304M output tokens on the index against a median of 72.8M and took 40.55 seconds to its first answer token. High produced 110M tokens and answers after 16.68 seconds.
The top setting is not always worth it. VentureBeat (2026) reports that Hydrogen scored 54% on Artificial Analysis's Terminal-Bench 4.0 at both high and xhigh, so xhigh raised the cost per index task from $1.87 to $3.16 with no gain there. Lower settings are cheaper: medium scores 41 at $0.80 and low scores 27 at $0.29. Claude Haiku 5.5, GPT-6 Luna and Muse Ember cost $0.14 to $0.41 per task but score 28 to 36.
Hydrogen, Argon and Carbon: Where Each Fits
Google sells Hydrogen as the execution engine beside Carbon and Argon, not as a replacement for them. In Antigravity, Orchestrator switches between Carbon and Hydrogen in one session and reached near-Carbon Terminal-Bench 4.0 success with 24% less quota and 19% faster completion, according to Google (2026).
For parallel agents, Google describes Carbon as the coordinator and Hydrogen as the worker and verifier agents that build and test changes in isolated workspaces. Carbon scores 60 on the independent board against Hydrogen's 51 at high, and Google puts Hydrogen one point above Argon at that level, 51 against 50. Our Gemini 4 Carbon analysis and Gemini 4 Argon analysis cover those models.
Price changes the split. According to The Next Web (2026), Carbon and Argon launched at $2 and $10 per million tokens and rise to $4 and $20 after an introductory period, and Carbon thinks longer, so a task can cost more. Hydrogen's price has no promotion to expire. On the Claude side, our Claude Fable 5.2 analysis covers the model that leads the same index at 65.
Security and Governance: Running Gemini 4 Hydrogen in Production
The main enterprise risk with Gemini 4 Hydrogen is that its agent safety claims are relative and mostly self-reported. Google says it cuts misaligned actions 12x against Gemini 3.8 Flash, yet it publishes no absolute injection rate. According to OWASP (2026), Prompt Injection is LLM01 and Excessive Agency is LLM03 (OWASP LLM Top 10 2026).
What Google reports on safety
| Area | What Google reports | What is missing |
|---|---|---|
| Overreach and under-service | Up to 81% less overreach and up to 79% less under-service in agentic tasks | Baseline model and test set |
| Misaligned actions | 12x fewer across tool-use and coding evaluations | Absolute rate |
| Permission boundaries | Up to 2x less likely to bypass them on impossible or blocked tasks | Absolute rate |
| Reasoning transparency | 99.9% chain-of-thought legibility, zero deceptive edits over 200,000+ audited turns | Method details |
| Indirect prompt injection | More than 2.3x more resilient on the Gray Swan IPI benchmark | Baseline and attack success rate |
Source: Google launch post (2026). Comparisons are against Gemini 3.8 Flash where the post names a baseline; it names none for the injection result.
Read these as direction, not as a rate you can budget for. A 2.3x improvement over an unstated baseline can still leave many attacks succeeding, and Hydrogen is meant to run as a worker agent that reads repositories, files and search results, where indirect injection arrives.
Data use and service tiers
According to VentureBeat (2026), Batch, Flex and the invite-only Contributor tier each cost half the standard rates. Contributor gives standard-tier speed in exchange for letting Google use data from participating requests to improve its products and train models. Confirm which tier your contract uses before regulated data arrives.
Controls that hold regardless of model
- Pin the thinking level per workload and cap xhigh, because cost per task ranges from $0.29 at low to $3.16 at xhigh.
- Log which model and thinking level answered each request, so multi-model routing stays auditable.
- Give worker and verifier agents least-privilege tools and short-lived credentials, because ASI02 (Tool Misuse) and ASI03 (Identity and Privilege Abuse) sit on OWASP's agentic list (OWASP Top 10 for Agentic Applications).
- Run your own indirect injection tests with your documents, repositories and tool output, since no absolute rate is published.
- Vet MCP servers and connectors before use, following our MCP security best practices.
NeuralTrust puts policy outside the model. The Agent Gateway (TrustGate) routes agent traffic to models, MCP servers and APIs through one policy point with identity-based access and budgets, and ships with 200+ pre-built MCP servers, so switching between Hydrogen, Carbon and Claude does not change the rules. Agent Runtime Security (TrustGuard) inspects prompts, tool calls and responses to block injection and secret leakage before they act. Our OWASP agentic guide covers the wider threat model.
Which Model Should You Choose?
Pick by workload and by what the agent reads. Hydrogen suits fast, document-heavy and workflow tasks, while Sonnet 5.5 is stronger in terminals and desktops. Carbon and Fable 5.2 score higher on the independent index, at a higher cost per task.
| Your situation | Better fit | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Replacing Gemini 3.8 Flash in agents | Gemini 4 Hydrogen (high) | Index 51 against 31, Terminal-Bench 4.1 at 57% against 18.2%, though token price doubles |
| Fast turnaround on agent tasks | Gemini 4 Hydrogen (high) | 7.9 minutes per task, against 34.1 for Sonnet 5.5 at max |
| Business automation and document work | Gemini 4 Hydrogen | AutomationBench-AA 76.1%, Agents' Last Exam 71.6%, MKA 53.4% |
| Terminal and computer-use agents | Claude Sonnet 5.5 | Leads Terminal-Bench 4.1, OSWorld-2.1 and Terminal-Bench-Science in Google's table |
| Hardest reasoning and long projects | Gemini 4 Carbon or Claude Fable 5.2 | Index 60 and 65 against 54 for Hydrogen at xhigh |
| Lowest cost for capable agents | GPT-6.1 Sol or Hydrogen (medium) | Sol scores 55 at $1.27 per task; Hydrogen medium scores 41 at $0.80 |
Conclusion
Gemini 4 Hydrogen is a faster, much smarter Flash successor that leads Google's own table against its price class and costs far less per task than Sonnet 5.5. It still trails Sonnet 5.5 in terminal and desktop work, costs twice Flash's introductory token price and is verbose at xhigh. Use high as the default, and test security yourself.
Secure Gemini 4 Hydrogen Agents in Production with NeuralTrust
Route Gemini, Claude and GPT agent traffic through one policy point with identity-based access, budgets and real-time inspection.
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Related Comparisons
- Gemini 4 Carbon: Benchmarks, Pricing and Security
- Gemini 4 Argon: Benchmarks, Pricing and Security
- Claude Sonnet 5.5: Benchmarks, Pricing and Security
- Claude Fable 5.2: Benchmarks, Pricing and Security
FAQs about Gemini 4 Hydrogen
1. When was Gemini 4 Hydrogen released?
Google released Gemini 4 Hydrogen on November 12, 2026. It is available in the Gemini API, Google AI Studio, Gemini for business, the Gemini app, Google Search and Gemini in Sheets. Paid Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers can use it in Google Antigravity.
2. How much does Gemini 4 Hydrogen cost?
Gemini 4 Hydrogen costs $1.50 per million input tokens and $7.50 per million output tokens, including reasoning tokens, flat across its context window. Cached input costs $0.075, and Batch, Flex and Contributor tiers cost half (VentureBeat, 2026). Artificial Analysis measured $1.87 per task at high and $3.16 at xhigh.
3. What is the Gemini 4 Hydrogen context window?
Google describes native input of 1 million tokens and output of up to 1 million tokens. VentureBeat reports that the roughly 1 million token window is shared by input, output, reasoning and tool calls, with a 65,536-token limit per foreground segment. Check the model documentation before designing around one figure.
4. Is Gemini 4 Hydrogen better than Gemini 3.8 Flash?
On every measure reported, yes. Google reports 2.5x faster tasks, Terminal-Bench 4.1 of 57% against 18.2%, and more than 5x fewer fabricated claims, and Artificial Analysis scores Hydrogen 51 against 31 at high. The token price is twice Flash's introductory rate through December 31.
5. Is Gemini 4 Hydrogen better than Gemini 4 Argon or Carbon?
Hydrogen at high scores 51 on the independent index, against 50 for Argon in Google's comparison and 60 for Carbon. Carbon is stronger on the hardest work. Hydrogen is faster and cheaper per task, and Google pairs it with Carbon in Orchestrator rather than presenting it as a replacement.
6. Is Gemini 4 Hydrogen better than Claude Sonnet 5.5?
It depends on the task. Google's table has Hydrogen ahead on seven of ten rows, including AutomationBench-AA (76.1% against 71.8%), while Sonnet 5.5 leads Terminal-Bench 4.1, OSWorld-2.1 and Terminal-Bench-Science. Artificial Analysis scores Sonnet 5.5 at 55 for $10.02 per task, against 54 for $3.16.
7. Is Gemini 4 Hydrogen safe for AI agents?
Google reports clear gains over Gemini 3.8 Flash, including 12x fewer misaligned actions and 2.3x better resilience on Gray Swan's indirect injection benchmark. It publishes no absolute attack success rate, so test Hydrogen against your own threats and enforce tool policy at the gateway and runtime layers.
About the Author
Roger Howroyd is Head of Global SEO and AI at NeuralTrust, where he leads the company's search strategy across SEO, AEO, GEO, and LLM optimization. He specializes in AI-powered search, content strategy, and SEM. Connect on LinkedIn.
NeuralTrust is the leading platform for securing and scaling AI agents. Named a Pioneer in the Gartner Emerging Market Quadrant for AI Application Security 2026, recognized across four Gartner Hype Cycle reports in 2026, and featured in the Gartner Market Guide for Guardian Agents 2026, the Gartner Market Guide for AI Gateways 2025 and the KuppingerCole Leadership Compass for Generative AI Defense 2025. Headquartered in Barcelona with offices in London and New York. ISO 27001 certified.
Sources
Accessed on November 13, 2026.
- Google, "Introducing Gemini 4 Hydrogen", November 12, 2026.
- Google, "Gemini 4 Hydrogen: everyday coding and agentic workflows for developers", November 12, 2026.
- VentureBeat, "Google launches Gemini 4 Hydrogen, a faster, smarter, pricier Flash successor", November 12, 2026.
- Artificial Analysis, "Gemini 4 Hydrogen (xhigh)" and "Gemini 4 Hydrogen (high)", 2026.
- Artificial Analysis, "Claude Sonnet 5.5", 2026.
- The Next Web, "Google's Gemini 4 Carbon is now open to paying developers and Ultra users", November 10, 2026.
- OWASP GenAI Security Project, "Top 10 for LLM Applications 2026" and "Top 10 for Agentic Applications 2026".
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