Google's Gemini 4 Argon just went through all three of our incident response benchmarks. A month ago GPT-6 Astra became the first model to sit at the top of every board. Argon is right next to it on every one, at about a quarter of the cost. 🔷 Blast Radius Bench: 65% pass, the same rate as Astra on our hardest board. Astra keeps first place on graded score (0.726 vs 0.688) because it does better on the hard tier. 🔷 Noise Bench: 94%, third overall, just ahead of Claude Opus 5. Its only miss is slow-burn-saturation, the scenario Astra was the first to crack. 🔷 RCA Bench: tied with Astra for first, including every adversarial scenario and every case where no commit is to blame. The cost is what sets it apart. Argon averaged $0.10 per RCA investigation, against $0.37 for Astra, $0.33 for Opus 5 and $0.59 for Fable 5.1. On Noise Bench it costs $0.08 per triage. The trade is time: Argon takes about two and a half minutes per investigation, while Astra takes about 70 seconds. The jump from the previous generation is large too. Gemini 3.1 Pro passed 71% on Noise Bench at roughly the same cost per investigation as Astra. Argon reaches 94% at a quarter of that price. My takeaway: last month frontier-level incident response came at a frontier price. Within a few weeks a second lab has matched it for a fraction of the cost.