Google has been playing catch up with OpenAI and Anthropic. Does its new flagship model really compete at the frontier?

This report is from this week's The Tech Download newsletter. Like what you see? You can subscribe here.2026 has been a turbulent year for Google's AI hopes and dreams. Things started well. Gemini 3, which launched towards the end of 2025, put Google very much in the frontier AI conversation. But for much of the rest of this year, it's Anthropic and OpenAI that have been at the forefront of AI advances.Google will undoubtedly be hoping the release of a new flagship model, Gemini 4 Argon, changes that. Samuel Boivin | Nurphoto | Getty ImagesThe frontierWhen Demis Hassabis stepped down as CEO of DeepMind, Google's AI lab, in August, I wrote that new boss Koray Kavukcuoglu was inheriting a race to catch-up with Sam Altman and Dario Amodei's companies.Now Google has touted the model as performing better than top OpenAI and Anthropic offerings in some benchmarks. Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, a composite benchmark score, places Gemini 4 as lagging behind only Claude Opus 5.5 and Claude Sonnet 5.5 on its leaderboard."Google Gemini 4 Argon shows advanced reasoning on critical tasks, according to benchmarks, particularly legal reasoning, finance and other aspects of enterprise kn...