Google’s Gemini 3.8 Flash is built to “work harder”

Google’s previous smartest AI model, Gemini 3.6 Flash, was released in late July. The tech giant wasted no time iterating on it, with Gemini 3.7 Flash launching just weeks after. Now, just three weeks later, the company is already introducing 3.7 Flash’s successor.

Google just announced Gemini 3.8 Flash, and this time around, the focus is on delivering next-generation intelligence for agentic workflows and cybersecurity with two different variants.

The new models mark Google’s third Flash release in six weeks, with new frontier models nowhere in sight. The new models are Gemini 3.8 Flash and Gemini 3.8 Flash Cyber. The former is the company’s “most intelligent workhorse model,” while the latter is its “most capable cybersecurity model.”

Gemini 3.8 Flash is primarily aimed at developers building agentic applications and workflows, though it is also available to regular Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers via the Gemini app.

According to Google’s numbers, Gemini 3.8 Flash outperforms most larger frontier models when it comes to the DeepSWE v1.1 benchmark. The benchmark measures the ability to autonomously solve complex engineering problems, and Gemini 3.8 Flash hit 73.7% on it. That’s just below Claude Opus 5‘s 74% score, and well above Gemini 3.7 Flash, Claude Sonnet 5, GPT-5.6 Sol and GPT-5.6 Terra.

Gemini 3.8 Flash also outperformed all of the aforementioned models on several other benchmarks, including financial analysis on Vals Finance Agent v2, complex legal workflows on Harvey’s Legal Agent Benchmark, information synthesis on CharXiv Reasoning, agentic terminal coding on Terminal-bench 2.1, long video understanding on LVBench, and more.

Google explained that “3.8 Flash works harder,” and hence the performance gains. On complex tasks, it reportedly exhibits greater diligence, with the model executing extra reasoning steps whenever necessary. That also means the model might, at times, use more tokens to maximize performance.

Gemini 3.8 Flash launches at $0.75 per million input tokens and $3.75 per million output tokens. This is introductory pricing, which will be revised to $1.50 and $7.50, respectively. Regardless, the model should still be cheaper than counterparts like Claude Opus 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol.

Gemini 3.8 Flash Cyber, on the other hand, isn’t available to all. Access to it is limited through a new Fairwind Program, which will let trusted government authorities, as well as critical infrastructure operators and software maintainers leverage the new model.

On the industry-standard benchmark for finding vulnerabilities in C/C++, the model scored 86.2%, beating its predecessor Gemini 3.5 Flash Cyber and larger models like Mythos 5 and GPT-5.5-Cyber. Similarly, in real-world vulnerability discovery spanning over 20 programming languages, the model reached a success rate of 71%, which is significantly higher than Gemini 3.7 Flash’s 58.9% and Gemini 3.5 Flash Cyber’s 46.6%.

Elsewhere, what makes the model special is its automated patching ability. Gemini 3.8 Flash Cyber equips defenders with the ability to generate patches to address vulnerabilities. According to the company’s numbers, the model produced 2.6 times more correct patches to vulnerabilities in Chrome “than the best commercial models that are much larger.”

For what it’s worth, most regular users will never really interact with the new model, but the improvements it offers to defenders and developers can have an indirect impact on making your everyday tech safer and better.

Gemini 3.8 Flash is rolling out now for developers, Enterprise customers, and Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers. Access to Gemini 3.8 Flash Cyber, as mentioned earlier, is limited to Fairwind Program members.