Google says its new Gemini 3.8 Flash model ‘works harder’ but might cost more

Google launched Gemini 3.8 Flash, arriving just a few weeks after its predecessor. The company claims the new model “works harder” than Gemini 3.7 Flash by performing more reasoning steps on complex tasks and “calling tools iteratively.” It has the same introductory pricing as 3.7 Flash, $0.75 per million input tokens and $3.75 per million output tokens, but could still end up costing users more. Google warns that “the model might use more tokens to maximize performance, especially at higher effort levels.” Developers can keep using Gemini 3.7 Flash if they want to minimize token usage.

Gemini 3.8 Flash’s launch was followed by some early impressions online. Artificial Analysis highlighted the model’s pricing, saying Gemini 3.8 Flash is “the cheapest we’ve measured at this level of intelligence. This is up ~40% from Gemini 3.7 Flash despite unchanged per-token pricing, driven by a 30% increase in output tokens per task and more turns on agentic evaluations.”

Aigora.ai CEO John Ennis compared Gemini 3.8 Flash to Anthropic’s models, saying it offers “Opus 5 coding quality but at a fraction of the cost and super fast,” adding, “This is going to be so awesome for things like making remotion videos.”

Google says Gemini 3.8 Flash offers “significant improvements” for software engineering and autonomous AI agents. It outperforms its predecessor and other frontier models on the DeepSWE v1.1 software engineering benchmark, including Anthropic’s Fable 5, which got an upgrade earlier this week that also promises stronger performance at a lower price, by cutting the price to use cached data.

Google’s new model also outperformed its competitors on the Vals Finance Agent V2 benchmark and Harvey’s Legal Agent benchmark. However, the new model also “ships with safeguards against misuse in the domains of Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear (CBRN) and cyber offense.”

Google also released Gemini 3.8 Flash Cyber alongside its new Fairwind Program, which is limited to governments and “trusted partners.” The program, whose 650 members include CrowdStrike and the Center for Internet Security, offers access to 3.8 Flash Cyber and Google’s CodeMender agent, which Google says can help “autonomously find and fix vulnerabilities, protecting critical infrastructure, public services, and national security.” Gemini 3.8 Flash is available now for consumers with a Google AI Pro or Ultra subscription, as well as developers and enterprise users.