Gemini 4 Argon Completes Eiffel Tower Task for $0.23 vs. $33.45 on Claude Opus 5.5

In a head-to-head task comparison building the Eiffel Tower, Google DeepMind's Gemini 4 Argon completed the job in one shot for $0.23, while Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 took 2 hours and cost $33.45 — making Argon approximately 145 times cheaper on that build. On a per-token basis, Argon launched with introductory pricing of $2 per 1M input tokens and $10 per 1M output tokens through November 30, 2026, which is half the price of Opus 5.5's $4 input and $20 output rates following a 20% price cut by Anthropic. The remaining cost gap stemmed from iteration volume, as Argon finished on the first pass with unified input and output support up to 1M tokens, whereas Opus 5.5 caps output at 128k tokens and relies on adaptive reasoning. In Google's report, Argon scored 68.9% on the Vals Index and led Opus 5.5 in 14 of 18 shared benchmark categories, while Opus 5.5 scored higher on independent aggregates like the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index and terminal-heavy benchmarks.