Gemini 4 Carbon: how to get it first, and the prompts behind the builds
Google’s new Gemini 4 Carbon beats Claude Opus 5.5 on 14 of 16 benchmarks, but almost nobody can use it yet. Here is the full guide: where it wins and where Claude still does, the three real ways to try it while access is closed, copy-paste prompts for the seven builds that went around, and three jobs it can do for a business.
On 28 October 2026, Google announced Gemini 4 Carbon, and it went straight to number one on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, one point above Claude Opus 5.5. Since then, demos credited to it have been going around: the black hole from Interstellar rebuilt live in a browser, a cat made of smoke, a fantasy kingdom you can fly through, a 3D helicopter, and the same Minecraft prompt run on Carbon and on Opus side by side.
There is a catch, and most posts about Carbon leave it out: almost nobody can use it yet. This guide covers what Carbon beats Claude at and where it still loses, the three real ways to get your hands on it while access is closed, copy-paste prompts for every build, and three jobs where its scores matter for a business. The figures were checked on 30 October 2026 against Google’s launch post, its evaluation methodology and the Fairwind Program page.
What Google just shipped
Gemini 4 Carbon is Google’s new frontier model. It ranks number one on version 5.0 of the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index with a score of 59, one point above Claude Opus 5.5 (58) and two above GPT-6 Astra (57). It is built for long jobs: Google says its own teams have watched Carbon work on the same engineering problem for days, getting past dead ends on its own.
Here is the scoreboard from Google’s official table, in plain English:
Where Claude still wins. Out of the 16 tests where both models have a score, Carbon beat Opus 5.5 on 14. The two it lost are FrontierSWE 2, a coding test (61.2% against 62.3%), and OSWorld 2.1, which measures using a real computer (81.5% against 87.2%). If your work is Claude driving your desktop, Claude is still the one to beat.
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