Google Releases Gemini 3.8 Flash and Cyber with Uneven Performance

Google released Gemini 3.8 Flash and its defensive variant Cyber on September 2, 2026. The standard model of Gemini 3.8 Flash is priced at $0.75 per million input tokens and $3.75 per million output tokens through December 31, 2026, but will increase to $1.50 and $7.50 respectively from January 1, 2027.

The standard model was made available across Google's developer and enterprise channels, as well as in selected subscription products. However, the Cyber variant is only accessible through the Fairwind Program, which prioritizes trusted government authorities, critical-infrastructure operators, and software maintainers.

Gemini 3.8 Flash shows improvements in certain areas, such as terminal work and agentic software engineering, but remains behind leading models like Claude Opus. The model's performance is uneven, with a 90.8% score on Terminal-Bench 2.1 compared to 81.6% for Gemini 3.7 Flash, but only a modest increase of 61.6% versus 60.4% on SWE-Bench Pro.

The Cyber variant of Gemini 3.8 Flash is specialized for autonomous vulnerability discovery and automated patching, with more permissive security mitigations than the standard model. However, its performance has not been independently verified, and organizations must apply to Fairwind to access it.