Google Releases Gemini 4 Hydrogen with New xhigh Reasoning Tier

Artificial Analysis (@ArtificialAnlys) · 2026-11-12 18

Google's new Gemini 4 Hydrogen has Intelligence just below Claude Sonnet 5.5 and GPT-6.1 Sol, at a third of Sonnet’s cost but ~2.5x that of GPT-6.1 Sol

@GoogleDeepMind has released their third new model in six weeks. Gemini 4 Hydrogen introduces an xhigh reasoning level and scores 54 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, with strengths in visual reasoning and non-hallucination. This places it 1 point behind Claude Sonnet 5.5 (max) and GPT-6.1 Sol (max), at ~32% of Sonnet’s cost but ~2.5x that of GPT-6.1 Sol. With high reasoning, Gemini 4 Hydrogen matches the Intelligence of Gemini 4 Argon for ~19% of the Cost per Task

Key takeaways:

➤ The new xhigh reasoning level scores 54 on the Intelligence Index: xhigh is the first reasoning level above high on a Gemini model, and puts Hydrogen 1 point below Claude Sonnet 5.5 (max) and GPT-6.1 Sol (max), and 4 points ahead of Gemini 4 Argon (high). With default (high) reasoning, Gemini 4 Hydrogen scores 51, just behind GPT-6.1 Sol (xhigh, 52) and Claude Opus 5.5 (high, 52)

➤ Strong visual reasoning, presentation and non-hallucination: On GDP.pdf, a visual reasoning benchmark over long documents, it scores 33% all-pass on medium reasoning, the tied #1 score on the benchmark. On AA-Omniscience, Hydrogen has one of the lowest hallucination rates recorded at 8%, compared with 43% for Claude Sonnet 5.5 (max) and 52% for GPT-6.1 Sol (max). On AA-Briefcase, our agentic knowledge work evaluation, graders rate Hydrogen's presentation above other Gemini models, including Carbon

➤ Weaker on agentic terminal work: Hydrogen scores 54% on Terminal-Bench 4.0 and 50% on Terminal-Bench-Science 0.1, covering agentic coding and scientific research workflows in the terminal. Claude Sonnet 5.5 (max) scores 64% and 53%, and GPT-6.1 Sol (max) scores 56% and 58%. xhigh reasoning helps on the science tasks, lifting Terminal-Bench-Science from 41% at high to 50%, but makes no difference on Terminal-Bench 4.0 (54% at both). Science scores are even across domains, from 46% in earth sciences to 53% in physical sciences

➤ Low cost for its intelligence, with high token use at xhigh: Hydrogen is priced at $1.50/$7.50 per million input/output tokens. At xhigh it costs ~32% as much per task as Claude Sonnet 5.5 (max) for near-equal intelligence, but ~2.5x as much as GPT-6.1 Sol (max). xhigh nearly doubles output tokens compared with high for a 3 point gain in Intelligence, and Cost per Task falls from $3.16 at xhigh to $1.87 at high. Medium ($0.80) and low ($0.29) cost less again, but score 41 and 27 on the Intelligence Index

➤ On the Time per Task vs. Intelligence Pareto frontier: Gemini 4 Hydrogen has an output speed of ~200 output tokens per second. With high, medium, and low reasoning effort, Gemini 4 Hydrogen is on the Time per Task vs. Intelligence Pareto frontier, meaning no models are both more intelligent and have a lower Time per Task

Key model details:

➤ Context Window: 1M tokens

➤ Multimodality: Text, image, video, and speech input, with text output

➤ Reasoning efforts: Gemini 4 Hydrogen offers four reasoning levels (low, medium, high, and xhigh) with xhigh new in this release

➤ Pricing: $1.50/$7.50 per 1M input/output tokens. Cached input tokens receive a 95% discount ($0.075)

Congratulations to the @GoogleDeepMind team on the launch!