Google ships cheaper Gemini Flash models, still no 3.5 Pro

Google released three new Gemini models: 3.6 Flash, 3.5 Flash-Lite, and a gated 3.5 Flash Cyber built for cybersecurity tasks like vulnerability finding via CodeMender. 3.6 Flash is more token-efficient and now priced at $7.50 per million output tokens, while Flash-Lite runs at roughly 350 tokens per second. The flagship Gemini 3.5 Pro is still missing, though Google says Gemini 4 is already in training.

Why it matters: Google is optimizing its cheap, high-volume tier for agentic workloads (lower token cost, higher throughput) while its frontier model stays stuck in training, a signal it's prioritizing cost-competitive infrastructure over flagship capability for now. The gated Flash Cyber model, limited to governments and select partners, also shows labs increasingly building specialized, access-restricted variants for sensitive security use cases instead of shipping everything broadly.