Google Releases Gemini 3.8 Flash and a Cyber Variant

The Release

Google has announced Gemini 3.8 Flash, an artificial intelligence model that the company describes as its best yet for reasoning and coding, according to Ars Technica.

It is the third release in Google's Flash line in six weeks. Ars Technica reports that Google has not released a frontier-level Gemini Pro model since early 2026.

The model comes in two versions. The standard Flash is pitched as a general purpose "workhorse" for tasks ranging from agentic work to software development. A second version, Gemini 3.8 Flash Cyber, is built on the same foundations but tuned for detecting and mitigating security vulnerabilities, and it replaces the 3.5 version of that model.

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Pricing and Benchmarks

Developers using Google's application programming interface can access the model at an introductory rate through the end of the year, at $0.75 per million input tokens and $3.75 per million output tokens. The regular price will be $1.50 and $7.50. Ars Technica notes this is the same pitch Google made for the 3.7 Flash release a couple of weeks earlier, and suggests the lower price reflects other AI labs cutting token prices to keep cautious businesses engaged.

Google's published benchmark figures show marginal improvement over Gemini 3.7 Flash on most tests, with larger gains in coding evaluations. The model now sits at the top of the DeepSWE leaderboard, which measures the ability to solve complex software engineering problems.

On OSWorld-2.0, a test of agentic computer use, Ars Technica reports that 3.8 Flash improves on 3.7 Flash but remains well behind the leader, Anthropic's Claude Opus. It notes that OpenAI's GPT does not perform well on that test either.

Google says internal testing shows a substantial improvement for the Cyber model over its predecessors. The full results of that testing are not described in the available reporting.

Internal Testing and Release Cadence

Before the public release, Business Insider reported that Google staff had been given a preview version, labelled "Gemini 3.8 Flash Preview", on the company's internal coding platform, Jetski. The publication said it obtained images showing this.

One employee told Business Insider the model already felt noticeably better than 3.7 Flash, while cautioning it was too early for a full assessment.

Business Insider reported that Gemini 3.6 Flash rolled out in July and 3.7 Flash followed three weeks later, and that chief executive Sundar Pichai said on the company's second quarter earnings call that Google would aim for an almost monthly release cadence. Ars Technica reports Google delayed Gemini 3.5 Pro when its coding performance could not match rivals, and says the pace of Flash releases makes it more likely that model never arrives.