Google has released Gemini 3.5 Flash, its fastest model in its intelligence class at over 280 output tokens per second, but it comes at 5.5 times the operating cost of its predecessor due to tripled token prices and significantly higher token consumption on agentic tasks. Despite strong improvements in agentic and multimodal benchmarks, the model notably underperforms competitors like GPT-5.5 and Claude Opus 4.7 in coding, one of the most important use cases for agentic AI. The price hike mirrors a broader industry trend, with Anthropic and OpenAI also raising effective costs on newer models, signalling that AI pricing is increasingly driven by complex, multi-step task demands rather than simple per-token rates.
