Gemini 3.8 Flash

Gemini 3.8 Flash, released September 2, 2026, was the fourth upgrade to Google's workhorse Flash tier in four months and the one aimed squarely at coding, the area where the line had trailed Anthropic and OpenAI. At launch it scored 89.4% on Terminal-Bench 2.1 for agentic terminal work — the best figure in Google's launch comparison, ahead of Claude Opus 5 at 89.1% and GPT-5.6 Sol at 88.8% — and 71.0% on DeepSWE v1.1 for long-horizon software engineering, up from 65.3% for 3.7 Flash. The harder agentic sets moved with it without closing the gap: 19.1% on Terminal-Bench 4.0 against 51.8% for Opus 5, and 59.0% on OSWorld 2.0 against 75.4%. Google kept the introductory price its predecessor had launched at, $0.75 per million input tokens and $3.75 per million output, against a regular rate of $1.50/$7.50, and the 1M-token context window came across unchanged.

The clearer wins at release were outside code. It led Google's comparison table on financial analyst work (61.4% on Vals Finance Agent v2), on legal workflows (10.0% all-pass-rate on Harvey's Legal Agent Benchmark, against 6.7% for Opus 5), on chart reasoning without tools (86.2% on CharXiv Reasoning), on long video (87.8% on LVBench navigating agentically, 87.1% static), and across the science evaluations — 56.5% on the human-difficult split of BioMysteryBench, seven points clear of the next model, and 86.2% on LAB-Bench 2. Expert reasoning landed at 54.9% on the verified edition of Humanity's Last Exam, within half a point of the frontier models it was priced at a fraction of, and knowledge work at a GDPval-AA v2 Elo of 1545. Read together the release was a Flash model buying most of a frontier model's breadth at Flash prices, while conceding the long-horizon agentic tasks to the tier above it.