Google Releases Gemini 3.6 Flash Amid Delayed Flagship Model

Google has released Gemini 3.6 Flash, its latest stable model for developers, which offers improved coding and multimodal performance at a lower cost. The new model uses fewer tokens than its predecessor, Gemini 3.5 Flash, with savings of up to 65% on certain benchmarks.

The price of Gemini 3.6 Flash is $1.50 per million input tokens and $7.50 per million output tokens, while the cheaper sibling, Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite, is listed at $0.30 per million input tokens and $2.50 per million output tokens.

Google's move to release Gemini 3.6 Flash comes as its flagship model, Gemini 3.5 Pro, remains delayed. The company had initially promised the release of Gemini 3.5 Pro in June, but it is still not listed as a public API model.

The delay has put pressure on Google, with rival models like OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol and xAI's Grok 4.5 gaining attention for their coding and agentic capabilities. The market is crowded, and the models that win are those that developers can actually get their hands on.