Google Prices Gemini 3.8 Flash at 75 Cents per Million Input Tokens and Claims Opus-Class Reasoning

Google released Gemini 3.8 Flash and a security-tuned sibling, 3.8 Flash Cyber, three weeks after its previous Flash refresh, according to 9to5Google. The model keeps a roughly one-million-token context window and ships at $0.75 per million input tokens and $3.75 per million output tokens, introductory pricing that expires on December 31, 2026 and then rises to $1.50 and $7.50.

The headline number is the one to treat carefully. On the verified subset of Humanity's Last Exam, a multi-step reasoning test spanning science, humanities and professional questions, Gemini 3.8 Flash scored 54.9 percent against 54.4 percent for Claude Opus 5, as reported by the Telegram channel AI Post. A half-point gap on a single evaluation is not a capability difference. It is a tie that happens to fall on the favorable side for the vendor publishing it, and no independent reproduction has appeared yet.

The agentic coding claim is larger and more version-dependent. Google reports 90.8 percent on Terminal-Bench 2.1, a benchmark for agentic command-line tasks, up from 81.6 percent for Gemini 3.7 Flash. On the newer and harder Terminal-Bench 4.0, a Hacker News commenter put the same model at 19.1 percent against Opus 5 at 51.8 percent. Both figures can be true at once, which is the point: which benchmark version a lab chooses to publish now matters as much as the model itself.

The Russian-language channel AI ML Big Data described the release as optimized for large mixed text-and-image workloads with a strong emphasis on software development, which matches how Google is positioning the Flash tier. The strategic content of the launch is not the reasoning score. It is a frontier lab putting near-frontier reasoning into its cheapest served tier, at a price that undercuts what premium models charge for comparable work, and putting a date on when that discount ends.