Gemini 4 Argon hands-on: strong long-context and agent scores, weak coding
A reviewer at sspai published a first hands-on test of Gemini 4 Argon, saying the model is now available to general users after a limited test that began on September 30, and comparing it with GPT-6 Astra, Claude Opus 5.5 and Claude Fable 5.1. The cited benchmark screenshots show 84.2% on GraphWalks long-context (claimed 12.4 points ahead of GPT-6 and 17.4 ahead of Claude Opus), 19.6% on Harvey's Legal Agent Benchmark, 65.4% on Vals Finance Agent v2, 51.3% on AutomationBench and 91.7% on LVBench long video; the author also says it reached the top text tier on Arena and roughly matched GPT on the AAII composite. Software-engineering and terminal tasks lag, however: FrontierSWE v2 at 55.0% (GPT-6 Astra 65.5%, Claude Opus 5.5 62.3%) and Terminal-bench 4.0 at 57.4% (Claude Opus 5.5 66.4%). In practice the author found 3D modeling better than GPT-6 and a racing-game prompt finished in about 10 minutes versus roughly 23 for GPT with fewer bugs, but criticized the front-end UI aesthetics, said coding still trails Claude and called the price-performance weaker than GPT-6.1. All scores are reviewer-cited screenshots and have not been independently verified.
If the numbers hold, Gemini 4 Argon marks Google's return to the frontier tier, though developers may still pick GPT or Claude for coding work.