Lab
Pushed the workhorse tier down rather than the frontier up, releasing Gemini 3.8 Flash at half its predecessor's price.
$0.75 / $3.75 per million, introductory
· 3 min
Gemini 4 Argon matches OpenAI's top model on an independent benchmark and comes with a far longer output limit, but for now only a small group of trusted testers can actually use it.
· 4 min
A joint NSA, CISA and FBI advisory accuses DeepSeek, Moonshot, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun and Z.AI of "industrial-scale" distillation; China's commerce ministry says the claim has no basis and promises countermeasures if the US acts.
· L4 Models · up to 1M tokens · Confirmed
Google DeepMind has released a new flagship AI model, Gemini 4 Argon, that can produce up to 1 million tokens (small pieces of text) in a single answer, up from 64,000 tokens before, what Google calls an 'industry-leading' increase. That lets it work through much longer problems in one pass instead of stopping partway. For now it is available only to a small group of trusted testers working on cyber-defence, with wider access to come later, and Google says the price will roughly double once an introductory period ends.
Read the story: Google's newest AI model can write up to a million tokens in one go, far beyond its old limit · Google DeepMind
· L4 Models · 0.920 and 0.914 on Hume's combined score; first in Voice Design · Confirmed
Hume AI said on 24 September that Google's new Gemini 3.8 Flash text-to-speech model ranks first overall in Voice Design on its Real-World VoiceEQ leaderboard. Gemini 3.8 Flash and Flash-Lite rank first and second on Hume's combined expressivity and reliability score, at 0.920 and 0.914, though Hume notes several other models score higher on reliability alone. The ranking is Hume's, not Google's. For people who use voice apps, it is an outside test of which AI voices sound most expressive while staying reliable.
· Band Rules and society · 6 companies named · Confirmed
The US National Security Agency, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the FBI published a joint advisory that names DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun and Z.AI. The agencies say these companies "extracted billions of tokens across millions of exchanges/requests" from American models including variants of Claude, GPT, Gemini and Grok, "since at least late 2024", and that this happened "likely with Chinese government awareness". Distillation, in plain terms, is training a new model on the answers of an existing one; the advisory says the technique is legitimate in research but that these campaigns were "industrial-scale". China's Ministry of Commerce replied the next day that the allegation has "no basis in fact and no basis in law" and that China "will resolutely take measures to counter" any US action against its AI companies. If US labs follow the advisory's recommendations, anyone using their models through an API may see closer monitoring of new accounts' usage and of usage patterns, both of which the advisory lists by name.
Read the story: Washington names six Chinese AI companies and says they trained on American models' answers. Beijing calls it baseless. · Moonshot AI · Anthropic · OpenAI · Google DeepMind
· L4 Models · $0.75 per 1M input, introductory · Confirmed
AI companies charge by the amount of text handled, counted in chunks called tokens. Google is keeping the rate at 75 cents for a million chunks going in, but says it ends on 31 December 2026 and doubles the next day.
Strata, the whole AI stack, explained simply. Every number carries a source and a confidence label.
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