When Google announced Gemini 4 Argon to a small group of testers on September 30, it came with a benchmark table that put Argon ahead of Claude Opus 5.5 on 14 of 18 tests. Those include DeepSWE (77.9% vs. 74.2%) and GraphWalks at 256K to 1 million tokens (84.2% vs. 66.8%). Two weeks later, on October 13, Google opened Argon to paid Gemini API developers.
To its credit, Google also showed where Opus 5.5 wins. Opus leads on the other four benchmarks, including Terminal-bench 4.0 (66.4% vs. 57.4%), which tests agentic work in a command line.
Google is also undercutting Anthropic on price, at least for now. Through November 30, Argon costs $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, half the price of Opus 5.5. On December 1, it rises to $4 and $20, matching Opus. That gives developers about six weeks to decide whether Argon is better or just cheaper.
That gives developers about six weeks to decide whether Argon is better or just cheaper.
Benchmarks don’t always match real work, and a half-price window only matters if the model matches the competitor on quality. To see whether Argon is better or just cheaper (for now), I tested both models head-to-head on three hard tasks from categories where Google claims a lead.
I ran each test once per model through OpenRouter, on Google’s and Anthropic’s own servers, at default reasoning settings. A script graded every answer against keys I built and verified before testing either model.
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