Google Releases Gemini 3.8 Flash, Third Budget Model in Six Weeks

Google has launched Gemini 3.8 Flash, its third budget model in six weeks. The new model is meant to outperform its predecessor by a significant margin in coding tasks.

The release comes three weeks after Gemini 3.7 Flash and includes two versions: a general-purpose reasoning and coding model, as well as a specialized cybersecurity version called 3.8 Flash Cyber.

According to Google's own numbers, Gemini 3.8 Flash achieves 73.7 percent on the DeepSWE v1.1 benchmark for long-horizon software engineering tasks, just below Claude Opus 5 at 74.0 percent but well ahead of its predecessor 3.7 Flash (65.3%).

Google says Gemini 3.8 Flash beats Anthropic's Opus 5 and OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol across many benchmarks despite being far cheaper.