Google introduced Gemini 3.8 Flash and Gemini 3.8 Flash Cyber on September 2, 2026, calling 3.8 its best reasoning and coding model yet at the same speed and price as 3.7 Flash. The company said this is its third Flash release in six weeks. The workhorse model is priced at $0.75 per million input tokens and $3.75 per million output tokens. The Cyber variant is reserved for trusted defenders through a new Fairwind Program.

Tulsee Doshi, senior director of product management, and Raluca Ada Popa, Gemini security lead at Google DeepMind, wrote that both models share the same core and were improved by long-running agentic loops plus training in cybersecurity. Google says 3.8 Flash often approaches higher-cost frontier models on long-horizon software work and on finance and legal agent tests.

A faster workhorse, and a gated cyber model

On DeepSWE v1.1, Google says 3.8 Flash beats most larger frontier models at solving engineering problems end to end. It scored 54.9 percent on HLE-Verified. The company says the model “works harder” on complex tasks, taking extra reasoning steps and calling tools more often, which can use more tokens at higher effort levels. Teams that want the cheaper path can still run 3.7 Flash.

Gemini 3.8 Flash Cyber is the security product. Google says it leads on CyberGym for autonomous vulnerability discovery and, on an internal set spanning 20 programming languages, finds bugs at a success rate above 70 percent. On Collinear’s CWE-Bench patching test, it posted a pass@1 of 47.2 percent against 47.8 percent for a larger frontier model, at lower cost. Google says it prioritized fixing over exploitation.

Inside Google, the Chrome Security team said 3.8 Flash Cyber produced 2.6 times more correct patches than the best larger commercial models it tried. Wiz reported 7.5 to 9.7 percent higher recall on an internal penetration-testing benchmark at 2.3 to 5.2 times lower cost. Google’s Cloud Vulnerability Research team said the model found a critical foundational vulnerability in less than two hours.

3.8 Flash is available in the Gemini API, Google AI Studio, Android Studio, Antigravity, Stitch, and Gemini Enterprise. Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers get it in the Gemini app and in AI Mode in Search. 3.8 Flash Cyber stays behind Fairwind.

Decoded Take

Google is selling cadence as much as capability. Three Flash drops in six weeks, a frozen price, and a cyber twin that only trusted defenders can touch is a bid to own the agent runtime before the next Astra-class model arrives. The Fairwind gate is the real product decision. If 3.8 Flash Cyber is as good at finding bugs as the Chrome and Wiz numbers suggest, keeping exploit workflows off the public API is the only way that story holds. Watch whether Fairwind is a short list of named labs or a waiting room, whether 3.8 Flash’s extra token burn shows up on enterprise bills, and whether the next Flash arrives before customers finish evaluating this one.