Google says its new Gemini 3.8 Flash model ‘works harder’ but might cost more

Google launched Gemini 3.8 Flash, arriving conscionable a fewer weeks aft its predecessor. The institution claims the caller exemplary “works harder” than Gemini 3.7 Flash by performing much reasoning steps connected analyzable tasks and “calling devices iteratively.” It has the aforesaid introductory pricing arsenic 3.7 Flash, $0.75 per cardinal input tokens and $3.75 per cardinal output tokens, but could still extremity up costing users more. Google warns that “the exemplary mightiness usage much tokens to maximize performance, particularly astatine higher effort levels.” Developers tin support utilizing Gemini 3.7 Flash if they want to minimize token usage.

Gemini 3.8 Flash’s motorboat was followed by immoderate early impressions online. Artificial Analysis highlighted the model’s pricing, saying Gemini 3.8 Flash is “the cheapest we’ve measured astatine this level of intelligence. This is up ~40% from Gemini 3.7 Flash contempt unchanged per-token pricing, driven by a 30% summation successful output tokens per task and much turns connected agentic evaluations.”

Aigora.ai CEO John Ennis compared Gemini 3.8 Flash to Anthropic’s models, saying it offers “Opus 5 coding value but astatine a fraction of the costs and ace fast,” adding, “This is going to beryllium truthful awesome for things for illustration making remotion videos.”

Google says Gemini 3.8 Flash offers “significant improvements” for package engineering and autonomous AI agents. It outperforms its predecessor and different frontier models connected the DeepSWE v1.1 package engineering benchmark, including Anthropic’s Fable 5, which got an upgrade earlier this week that besides promises stronger capacity astatine a little price, by cutting the value to usage cached data.

Google’s caller exemplary besides outperformed its competitors connected the Vals Finance Agent V2 benchmark and Harvey’s Legal Agent benchmark. However, the caller exemplary besides “ships pinch safeguards against misuse successful the domains of Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear (CBRN) and cyber offense.”

Google besides released Gemini 3.8 Flash Cyber alongside its caller Fairwind Program, which is constricted to governments and “trusted partners.” The program, whose 650 members see CrowdStrike and the Center for Internet Security, offers entree to 3.8 Flash Cyber and Google’s CodeMender agent, which Google says tin thief “autonomously find and hole vulnerabilities, protecting captious infrastructure, nationalist services, and nationalist security.” Gemini 3.8 Flash is disposable now for consumers pinch a Google AI Pro aliases Ultra subscription, arsenic good arsenic developers and endeavor users.