OpenClaw adds Google's Gemini 4 Argon in its new stable release

OpenClaw users with a Google key can now run their agent on Gemini 4 Argon, a model Google launched on the 13th of October at an introductory price that doubles on the 1st of December, according to Google's own pricing page. The OpenClaw project added Argon support in its stable release published on the 24th of October 2026, according to the project's public release notes on GitHub.

The same release also works on recovery, the notes say: an interrupted conversation keeps its recovery record, an interrupted update picks up where it stopped and backups keep the last good copy of the settings. For a person who talks to an agent every day, the practical questions are simple: what Argon is, how to pick it and what a normal day of chats could cost.

What Gemini 4 Argon is

Argon is a large language model, the "brain" an agent uses to read and write, made by Google DeepMind. Google announced it on the 13th of October and called it its "latest frontier model" for developers, companies and consumers. Google's developer changelog lists Argon as generally available, open to every paying developer, from that same day.

Argon is a "thinking" model. It works through a problem in steps before it answers. Those hidden steps are billed too, as part of the answer, according to Google's pricing page.

What it costs

Google bills by the token, a small piece of a word. Prices are per million tokens. The table uses the rates on Google's own pricing page, read on the 24th of October, with euros at the European Central Bank reference rate of the 23rd of October 2026, 1 euro = 1.1193 dollars.

Google's pricing page also says Argon sits outside the free tier. A paid Google key is required.

What a day of agent chats could cost

An agent's request to the model usually carries more than the message a person types, such as the earlier conversation and the agent's own instructions. The sizes below are an illustration chosen for the arithmetic: each exchange sends about 10,000 tokens and gets about 1,000 back. At the introductory prices on Google's pricing page, one such exchange costs about $0.03 (€0.03).

• 50 exchanges a day: about $1.50 (€1.34) until the 30th of November.
• The same day from the 1st of December: about $3.00 (€2.68).
• A month of such days: about $45 (€40.20) now, about $90 (€80.41) from December.

Longer answers and higher thinking settings move the figure up. Repeated text that Google caches moves it down, since cached input is billed at $0.10 (€0.09) per million tokens on the pricing page.

What changes in OpenClaw for a Google key

The change behind the release was merged on the 14th of October, according to the project's public code history on GitHub. It brings four practical points.

• Argon is in the built-in list. It appears among OpenClaw's Google models, and also under Google Vertex, the Google Cloud route used by companies. A user picks it like any other model in that list.
• It works across a whole task. The change describes Argon working end to end, including tool use, the actions an agent takes such as searching or reading a file, over many turns of a conversation.
• The thinking setting maps across. OpenClaw's low, medium and high settings match Argon's own three levels. Argon always thinks a little, so the lowest OpenClaw settings run at Argon's low level, the lightest of the three.
• Caching runs on its own. Google supports only automatic caching for Argon, the change notes, so repeated text gets the cached price with no setting to switch on.

One more point looks ahead. Newer Gemini 4 releases from Google are picked up automatically, without waiting for a new OpenClaw version, according to the same change.

The project's beta channel, its test track for early adopters, went one step further on the 15th of October. That beta made Argon the default Gemini model alongside Gemini 3.8 Flash, according to its release notes.

The date to remember: the 1st of December

Every Argon price doubles on the 1st of December 2026, according to Google's announcement and its pricing page. The introductory period ends on the 30th of November.

An agent that runs all day keeps spending all day. A user who chooses Argon in November and checks the bill once in early December will see the new rate from that day on.

That kind of agent also needs a machine that stays on around the clock. OneClickClaw runs OpenClaw on a dedicated server from €14.99 a month, with a 7-day free trial at oneclickclaw.io.