TLDR
- Alphabet (GOOGL) fell 2% in recent trading even as BNP Paribas issued a bullish note.
- BNP Paribas kept a Buy rating and a $420 price target on GOOGL stock.
- Gemini 4 Argon beat OpenAI and Anthropic models in 13 of 19 benchmarks.
- Argon is not public yet. It is being tested with the U.S. government and select cybersecurity partners.
- Wall Street has a Strong Buy consensus on GOOGL, with an average price target of $427.88, implying 27% upside.
Alphabet (GOOGL) stock dropped 2% even as BNP Paribas analyst Nick Jones doubled down on his Buy rating. Jones kept his $420 price target after Google unveiled Gemini 4 Argon, its newest AI model.
Jones ranks #223 out of over 12,500 analysts tracked on Wall Street. He said the launch proves Google is still serious about competing at the frontier of AI development.
Argon beat OpenAI’s Astra and Anthropic’s Fable 5.1 and Opus 5.5 in 13 of 19 benchmarks. That covers coding, cyber defense, and multimodal tasks.
CEO Sundar Pichai posted on X that the model has “frontier safeguards” and is rolling out carefully. It’s currently with the U.S. government and a group of trusted cyber defenders through Google’s Fairwind Program.
Pichai said more is coming soon. He wrote that people will “see us iterating rapidly” with Gemini going forward.
What’s Next for Gemini 4
Jones expects Google to release more Gemini 4 models at different price points. Each would target different kinds of tasks and budgets.
He also floated the idea of a consumer-facing AI agent. This would work similar to Meta’s Muse, built across Google’s massive user base of apps and services.
That kind of product could tap into Google’s existing reach. Search, Gmail, and Android already touch billions of people worldwide.
Pricing for Argon has already been set. It will cost $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens once public.
Cached input tokens get a steep discount too, coming in at 95% off the standard input price.
Argon isn’t just sitting in a lab either. Google says staff are already using it internally for coding, research, and writing tasks.
A Longer Road Than Expected
This model had a bumpy path to launch. It was originally expected around June under the name Gemini 3.5 Pro.
Google pushed the release back to focus on coding performance and safety testing. The company rebranded the effort as Gemini 4 Argon somewhere along the way.
That delay came at a cost. Alphabet’s market value has dropped close to 20% since, as investors worried Google was falling behind OpenAI and Anthropic.
Despite the rocky stretch, Wall Street sentiment remains strong. GOOGL holds a Strong Buy consensus from 24 Buy ratings and four Holds over the past three months.
The average price target across analysts sits at $427.88. That implies roughly 27% upside from current levels.
Google DeepMind’s Chief AI Architect, Koray Kavukcuoglu, said the company is still collecting feedback from early testers. Guardrails are being refined before Argon reaches developers, enterprises, and everyday users.
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