Google Drops Three New Gemini Models, But Flagship 3.5 Pro Still Missing

California: Google DeepMind has released three new AI models, Gemini 3.6 Flash, Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite, and Gemini 3.5 Flash Cyber, but the launch has drawn as much attention for what is missing as for what was delivered.

Gemini 3.6 Flash is described as Google’s “workhorse model,” promising better coding, knowledge work, and multimodal performance while reducing token usage by up to 17%, making it cheaper than its predecessor. It is priced at $1.50 per million input tokens and $7.50 per million output tokens, down from $9 per million output tokens previously.

Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite, at 350 tokens per second, is the fastest model in the 3.5 lineup and is designed for high-volume tasks. It is also the most affordable option in the series, targeting businesses running large-scale AI workloads.

The third model is more specialized. Gemini 3.5 Flash Cyber was fine-tuned to find and fix cybersecurity vulnerabilities and will be exclusively available to governments and trusted partners as part of a limited access pilot program. The model also comes with additional safeguards against Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear misuse risks.

All three models are designed to provide “efficiency, low latency, and reliability” for developers building AI agents at scale.

However, the bigger story is the continued absence of Gemini 3.5 Pro. When Google announced Gemini 3.5 at its May Google I/O event, it stated explicitly that 3.5 Pro was in internal use and would roll out ‘the following month’. But past that promised June deadline, the explanation has shifted to the model being in partner testing, with broad availability coming ‘once it’s ready’. No new date was given.

There were earlier reports that the delay was linked to the model failing to meet Google’s internal performance benchmarks.

Google DeepMind product lead Logan Kilpatrick said on Tuesday that the company is currently testing Gemini 3.5 Pro with partners and hopes to land soon. He also noted that the team has started its most ambitious pre-training run yet for Gemini 4.

The delay puts Google in an awkward position. In the time since the last Pro update in February, OpenAI has released GPT-5.5 and begun rolling out GPT-5.6, while Anthropic has launched Claude Opus 4.8, Claude Sonnet 5, and expanded access to its frontier Fable 5 model.

Gemini 3.6 Flash and 3.5 Flash-Lite are now available via the Gemini API in Google AI Studio, for businesses via Gemini Enterprise, and for everyone else in the Gemini app.