OpenAI employee arrested for hidden recorder; Google releases Gemini 4 Argon with December price hike

Google began general release of its top-tier model, Gemini 4 Argon, on October 13. It is available to paid API users and Google AI Pro subscribers ($19.99/month), but not on the free tier. Pricing is $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens until November 30, then doubles to $4 and $20 respectively. Google reports 77.9% on long-term programming tasks, above GPT-6 Astra (74.1%) and Claude Opus 5.5 (74.2%), though figures are self-measured.

Over 400 scientists, including Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, and Stuart Russell, signed an open letter demanding AI capable of hacking be developed in air-gapped environments, with an international body governing internet connections and escape reporting. Meanwhile, The New York Times, AFP, and The Economist joined the SPUR coalition, now over 80 organizations, which released a standard for AI to report article usage back to publishers. Major AI companies have not yet adopted it.