After the last model release three weeks ago, Google today is rolling out Gemini 3.8 Flash. This marks the third Flash update in three months.

…our most intelligent workhorse model, delivering significant improvements from 3.7 Flash across software engineering, agentic tasks, and critical, multi-step reasoning in specialized domains.

Gemini 3.8 Flash “delivers substantial gains” over its predecessor in various benchmarks, with Google also noting how it is “often approaching the performance of higher-cost frontier models.”

• On DeepSWE v1.1 (Long-Horizon Software Engineering) 3.8 Flash outperforms most larger frontier models in autonomously solving complex engineering problems end to end, only at a fraction of the cost.

• In quantitative and professional fields that require advanced analysis and reporting, 3.8 Flash outperforms 3.7 Flash and other frontier models in benchmarks like Vals Finance Agent V2 and Harvey’s Legal Agent Benchmark.
• 3.8 Flash also achieves a 54.9% on HLE-Verified, demonstrating its ability to handle multi-step reasoning across STEM, humanities, and professional fields.

Google says these “performance gains stem from a core design choice: 3.8 Flash works harder.”

On complex tasks, it exhibits greater diligence — executing extra reasoning steps, and calling tools iteratively. At times, the model might use more tokens to maximize performance, especially at higher effort levels.

Note: Updated DeepSWE v1.1 score

Similar to the previous model, Gemini 3.8 Flash’s knowledge cutoff date is March 2026 “for some domains while in others [users] may experience the model’s knowledge is limited to January 2025.”

Google is once again offering an introductory price of $0.75/1M input tokens and $3.75/1M output tokens until December 31.

Gemini 3.8 Flash is already live in the Gemini app for Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers, AI Mode, and Gemini in Google Sheets. It’s also available for developers in Google Antigravity, AI Studio, and the Gemini API.

Google today also announced Gemini 3.8 Flash Cyber (replacing 3.5) for trusted testers — via a new Fairwind Program — with “frontier-level performance in autonomous vulnerability discovery.”

• The Chrome Security team found that 3.8 Flash Cyber produced 2.6 times more correct patches to vulnerabilities in Chrome than the best commercial models that are much larger.
• Wiz found that Gemini 3.8 Flash Cyber achieves +7.5-9.7% higher recall on their internal penetration testing benchmark for a 2.3-5.2x lower cost compared to other leading frontier models.
• Google’s Cloud Vulnerability Research team leveraged the 3.8 Flash Cyber model to find a critical foundational vulnerability in less than 2 hours, a vulnerability for which research and discovery usually takes months.

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