Google releases Gemini 3.6 Flash, 3.5 Flash-Lite and 3.5 Flash Cyber
But no 3.5 Pro
Confirmed
The takeaway
On 21 July 2026 Google shipped Gemini 3.6 Flash (17% fewer output tokens than 3.5 Flash, OSWorld-Verified 83.0%, knowledge cutoff March 2026), the cheap Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite ($0.30/$2.50) and a gated Gemini 3.5 Flash Cyber.
Status
- Claim
Confirmed
- Our reporting
- High confidence
- Importance
- 3 of 5
- Last verified
- 29 September 2026
Your AI and this story
- GPT-6 Astra82 days after its cutoff
- Claude Opus 5.521 days after its cutoff
- Gemini 4 Hydrogen112 days after its cutoff
- Grok 4.751 days after its cutoff
None of these four assistants can know about it. The closest, Claude Opus 5.5, stops 21 days before it.
Key facts
- GA 2026-07-21: gemini-3.6-flash and gemini-3.5-flash-lite
- 3.6 Flash price: $1.50 input / $7.50 output per 1M tokens (3.5 Flash output was $9)
- 3.6 Flash: 17% fewer output tokens than 3.5 Flash (Artificial Analysis); DeepSWE 49% (vs 37%); MLE-Bench 63.9% (vs 49.7%); OSWorld-Verified 83.0% (vs 78.4%)
- 3.6 Flash knowledge cutoff moved to March 2026
- 3.5 Flash-Lite: $0.30 / $2.50 per 1M tokens; ~350 output tokens/s; Terminal-Bench 2.1 54% (vs 31% for 3.1 Flash-Lite); SWE-Bench Pro 54.2%
- 3.5 Flash Cyber: limited to governments and trusted partners via CodeMender pilot
- Same day the API deprecated temperature, top_p and top_k parameters
- Google: Gemini 3.5 Pro ‘currently testing with partners’; ‘most ambitious pre-training run yet, for Gemini 4’ started
What happened
Google DeepMind released three models on 21 July 2026: Gemini 3.6 Flash (new default workhorse, more token-efficient, better at coding, ML research and computer use), Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite (high-throughput, low-latency tier) and Gemini 3.5 Flash Cyber (vulnerability detection/patching, limited-access pilot). The Gemini API simultaneously deprecated the classic sampling parameters temperature, top_p and top_k.
Why it matters
The launch was widely read through what was missing: Gemini 3.5 Pro, promised at I/O for June, had not shipped (Bloomberg reported it struggled to meet internal performance goals). Google instead doubled down on Flash-tier models and publicly confirmed Gemini 4 pre-training had started.
Sources
5 sources from 5 sites. Numbers match the chips in the text.
5 sources: 3 primary, 2 press
Primary
- Google blog: Gemini 3.6 Flash, 3.5 Flash-Lite, 3.5 Flash Cyberblog.google, official
- Gemini 3.6 Flash model carddeepmind.google, official
- Gemini API release notesai.google.dev, docs
Press
- TechCrunch: Google releases three new Gemini models — but no 3.5 Protechcrunch.com, press
- 9to5Google: Gemini 3.6 Flash and 3.5 Flash-Lite launch, teases Gemini 49to5google.com, press
Changes
- Filed