Google ships three Flash models while its flagship slips

Google released three Gemini models today: 3.6 Flash, 3.5 Flash-Lite, and 3.5 Flash Cyber, a security-tuned variant available under restricted access.

Gemini 3.6 Flash is priced at $1.50 per million input tokens and $7.50 per million output tokens. It produces roughly 17 percent fewer output tokens than its predecessor, and its knowledge cutoff moves forward to March 2026.

The flagship 3.5 Pro has now slipped past several expected ship dates and remains unreleased. Google separately announced it has begun what it describes as its most ambitious pretraining run yet, for Gemini 4, positioning the next generation while the current one is still incomplete.

3.5 Flash Cyber joins Anthropic's Mythos-class models as a restricted-access security tool, making Google the second major lab to gate dual-use security capability behind access controls.

Token efficiency may matter more than the headline price. Output is billed at five times the input rate, so emitting fewer tokens for the same result lowers cost on every call.