Google has introduced two additions to its Gemini “Flash” lineup, along with a specialized cybersecurity model, 3.5 Flash Cyber, while holding off on releasing a long-awaited Gemini 3.5 Pro.
In a July 21 blog post, Google announced Gemini 3.6 Flash and Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite, describing them as built to give developers the “efficiency, low latency, and reliability” needed to run AI agents at scale. The post also detailed Gemini 3.5 Flash Cyber, a specialized model paired with Google’s CodeMender security agent.
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The announcement also included a brief update on Gemini 3.5 Pro, which Google says “is currently testing with partners,” with general availability “as soon as it’s ready.” The post added that Google has already begun training runs for a future Gemini 4 model.
At the Google I/O event in May, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai announced that Gemini 3.5 Pro would launch in June. Since then, Anthropic and OpenAI have launched new frontier models, Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol, while the Chinese AI lab Moonshot recently launched Kimi K3, a more affordable but still competitive open-source AI model. It’s against this backdrop that Google announced its new trio of Gemini models.
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According to the post, Gemini 3.6 Flash is positioned as the company’s general-purpose “workhorse” model, offering improvements in coding, knowledge work, and multimodal tasks compared to 3.5 Flash. Google also priced the model lower than 3.5 Flash, at $1.50 per million input tokens and $7.50 per million output tokens. Google released benchmark evaluations of Gemini 3.6 Flash, showing improvements in a variety of domains.
Credit: Google
Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite, meanwhile, is billed as the fastest model in the 3.5 series, reportedly capable of 350 output tokens per second, per Artificial Analysis figures cited in the post, at a lower price point of $0.3 per million input tokens and $2.5 per million output tokens. Google writes that the model is intended for high-throughput, latency-sensitive workloads like agentic search and document processing, and that it outperforms the prior Flash-Lite generation across agentic benchmarks.
Credit: Google
The most narrowly targeted release, Gemini 3.5 Flash Cyber, is designed specifically to detect and patch software vulnerabilities and is being deployed inside CodeMender, Google’s code security agent. Per the post, the model will not be broadly available; Google says it plans to offer it exclusively to governments and select partners through a limited-access pilot, citing the dual-use risks associated with a model capable of finding security flaws.
Google also said the newly released 3.6 Flash model includes expanded safety measures to resist jailbreak attempts related to chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear misuse, as well as cyber offenses, while aiming to avoid unnecessary refusals for legitimate use cases.
Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April 2025 filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.
