Google Releases Gemini 3.8 Flash and a Security-Only Flash Cyber

What happened

On September 2, 2026, Google released Gemini 3.8 Flash, which it calls its "most intelligent workhorse model." It is Google's third Flash release in about six weeks and arrived roughly three weeks after 3.7 Flash.

Google released a specialized sibling at the same time: Gemini 3.8 Flash Cyber.

Gemini 3.8 Flash

  • What Google says improved: software engineering, agent tasks, and multi-step reasoning in specialized domains.
  • Introductory price: $0.75 per million input tokens and $3.75 per million output tokens, the same as 3.7 Flash. The introductory price expires on December 31, 2026.
  • Regular price from January 1, 2027: $1.50 input / $7.50 output.
  • Where to get it: developers via Google AI Studio, Android Studio and the Gemini API; businesses via Gemini Enterprise; consumers via the Gemini app, AI Mode in Search and Google Sheets.

Gemini 3.8 Flash Cyber

Google says Flash Cyber delivers "frontier-level performance in vulnerability detection and automated patching." Access is restricted to "trusted defenders" through Google's new Fairwind Program, which covers government authorities, critical infrastructure operators and software maintainers.

Google reports a 47.2% pass@1 score on the CWE-Bench patching benchmark, and a success rate above 70% on real-world vulnerability discovery.

Why it matters

Google and Anthropic (with Mythos 5.1) now both restrict their most capable security models to vetted users. The restrictions arrive in the wake of the summer's autonomous agent breaches (see our incident timeline).

Sources

This article was drafted with AI assistance and checked against the sources above. Benchmark figures are Google's own.