Argon will launch at an introductory price [1] of $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, with cached input tokens priced at 95% off input token price.

  [1] After the introductory period expires, the price of $4 per 1M input tokens and $20 per 1M output tokens will apply.

So, they are basically offering opus 5.5 pricing. On AA, it scores around Sol 6.1 level (53) with avg cost per task $1.99 (https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/gemini-4-argon#cost-tab...) which is higher than Astra high ($1.73), Opus 5.5 high ($1.82), Muse Max ($1.60) and way higher than sol 6.1 Max ($0.72).

And this pricing is their 'discount pricing'. Add that to AI studio and Vertex's famously terrible caching, it is hard to see this as competitive. Google somehow is getting terrible advice on pricing (see also: the flash pricing fiasco)

But good to see more competition. I would happily take a 4 horse race (+google, +meta) than 2 horse race for US labs.