Google releases Gemini 3.6 Flash, 3.5 Flash-Lite and 3.5 Flash Cyber
Google cut per-token cost and lifted coding and computer-use benchmark scores on its efficiency tier, while Gemini 3.5 Pro remained unreleased and still in partner testing.
- Models & capabilities
- Minor
Google released three additions to its Gemini 3.x line: Gemini 3.6 Flash, a replacement for its mid-tier “workhorse” model; Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite, pitched as the cheapest and fastest model in its class; and Gemini 3.5 Flash Cyber, a variant tuned for vulnerability detection and patching that Google restricted to governments and vetted partners through its CodeMender pilot.
Google priced 3.6 Flash at $1.50 per million input tokens and $7.50 per million output tokens, and said it cut output-token usage by roughly 17% against its predecessor while improving coding and computer-use scores — it reported 49% against 37% on the DeepSWE coding benchmark and 83.0% against 78.4% on OSWorld-Verified. Flash-Lite, priced lower still at $0.30/$2.50 per million tokens, was aimed at high-throughput agentic workloads.
What the release did not include was as notable as what it did: Gemini 3.5 Pro, Google’s flagship-tier model, was absent. TechCrunch reported that Google was struggling internally to meet performance targets for that model, which had last been updated the previous February, and quoted a Google product lead saying the team was still testing it with partners and hoped to ship it “soon.” The company said separately that it had begun its most ambitious pre-training run yet, for Gemini 4.