Google rolls out new Gemini AI model but restricts access over safety concerns

Google on Wednesday said it would withhold its most powerful artificial intelligence model from the public for now, releasing Gemini 4 Argon only to a vetted group of cybersecurity experts to avoid misuse by hackers.

“Safely releasing frontier capabilities at this level requires a phased approach,” wrote Koray Kavukcuoglu, Google’s chief AI architect, in a blogpost announcing the model.

Google said it was voluntarily giving the US government early access to the model and would gather feedback from testers before making it widely available.

The cautious rollout mirrors the approach of rival Anthropic, which has kept its most advanced model, Claude Mythos Preview, restricted to a small number of trusted organizations.

Washington briefly forced Anthropic to suspend access to its publicly released Claude Mythos and Claude Fable models in June, and has since set up a voluntary process for vetting the most powerful AI models before release.

The announcement came a day after Donald Trump hosted top tech executives, including the Google chief, Sundar Pichai, and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, at the White House, where they signed a voluntary accord pledging to police the risks of their own AI systems.