Google's New Bug-Finding Gemini Goes Only to Screened Defenders
Google released two new versions of its Gemini Flash model on Sept. 2: Gemini 3.8 Flash, generally available, and Gemini 3.8 Flash Cyber, a version tuned for finding and fixing software vulnerabilities that the company is giving only to organizations it screens.
Access to Flash Cyber runs through a new Google program called Fairwind, which the company says gives prioritized access to government authorities, critical-infrastructure operators and software maintainers. Google says the cyber model ships with "a more permissive set of mitigations" than the general one, which it says carries safeguards against chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear misuse and against cyber offense.
Pricing for the general model is unchanged from 3.7 Flash, released three weeks earlier: $0.75 per million input tokens and $3.75 per million output tokens, according to the announcement. Google says that is an introductory rate that expires Dec. 31, 2026, after which it doubles to $1.50 and $7.50 per million tokens. The company says 3.7 Flash remains fully supported for efficiency-first work, because 3.8 Flash "works harder" and can spend more tokens on a task.
Every performance figure published with the release is Google's own, and no independent evaluation of either model has been published. Google reports 54.9% for 3.8 Flash on HLE-Verified, a multi-step reasoning test. On CWE-Bench, an external patching benchmark run by Collinear, the company reports that Flash Cyber patched 47.2% of cases correctly on the first attempt, against 47.8% for what it calls a leading frontier model and does not name; the claim it makes there is lower cost, not higher accuracy. On an internal benchmark spanning 20 programming languages, Google puts the model's vulnerability-discovery success rate above 70%.
Google also cites two deployments. Its own Chrome Security team, it says, got 2.6 times more correct patches from Flash Cyber than from larger commercial models, and the security firm Wiz measured 7.5% to 9.7% higher recall on its internal penetration-testing benchmark at 2.3 to 5.2 times lower cost.
Gemini 3.8 Flash reaches consumers through Google AI Pro and Ultra subscriptions. It is Google's third Flash release in six weeks.
