Google Ships Gemini 3.5 Flash, Kills Gemini CLI, and Triples the Price

Google used its I/O 2026 keynote to ship Gemini 3.5 Flash, the latest mid-tier model in its Gemini family. The headline specs are genuinely impressive: 76.2% on Terminal-Bench 2.1, 83.6% on MCP Atlas, and 84.2% on CharXiv Reasoning. Those numbers put it ahead of Gemini 3.1 Pro on agentic and coding tasks, which is the kind of leap you expect from a half-step release, not a full version bump.

The model also runs fast. Google claims 4x the output speed of comparable frontier models, with an even faster "turbo" variant clocking in at 12x speed. That turbo mode is already live inside Antigravity, Google's new agent-first development platform that got a major spotlight during the keynote.

But the launch has been overshadowed by two moves that have developers furious: a brutal price increase and the sudden death of Gemini CLI.

The pricing controversy

Gemini 3.5 Flash costs $1.50 per million input tokens and $9 per million output tokens. That is a flat 3x increase over Gemini 3 Flash, which was priced at $0.50/$3.

Google is not hiding from this. Koray Kavukcuoglu, CTO of Google DeepMind, told reporters the pricing reflects the model's performance gains. The pitch is that enterprises will still save over $1 billion annually because the model is faster and more accurate, reducing the total tokens needed per task.

Developers are not buying it. On Reddit and X, the reaction has been scathing. The core complaint is simple: even if the model is better, a 200% price hike on a product that was already competitive feels like a bait-and-switch. Gemini 3 Flash was the budget option that punched above its weight. Now the budget option costs what Sonnet used to cost.

The token usage is another sore point. Early testers report that Gemini 3.5 Flash burns through context windows aggressively. The 1M-token context window sounds generous until you realize the model routinely uses 50,000+ tokens on tasks that 3 Flash handled in 10,000. The per-token pricing masks the real cost, which is total tokens consumed multiplied by that $9 output rate.

Gemini CLI is dead, long live Antigravity CLI

On June 18, 2026, Gemini CLI will stop serving requests for Google AI Pro, Ultra, and free-tier users. The announcement came with a blog post framing the move as a natural evolution: developers need multi-agent workflows, not single-agent terminal tools, so Google is pouring everything into Antigravity CLI.

The problem is timing and tone. Gemini CLI only launched last year. It racked up 100,000 GitHub stars and 6,000 merged pull requests. Developers built workflows around it. Now, nine months later, Google is telling those same developers to migrate to a new tool that does not have feature parity and requires a different architecture.

Antigravity CLI is built in Go, which makes it snappier than the old Node-based Gemini CLI. It supports asynchronous multi-agent workflows and shares a backend with Antigravity 2.0, Google's new desktop IDE. The critical features from Gemini CLI — Agent Skills, Hooks, Subagents, and Extensions — are preserved as Antigravity plugins.

But early reviews are rough. Reddit users describe Antigravity CLI as "very crude" with "catastrophically low" token limits even for paid subscribers. The documentation is reportedly sparse, and the migration path is unclear. One developer put it bluntly: "They shouldn't have released it in this state."

Enterprise customers get a reprieve. If your organization pays for Gemini Code Assist Standard or Enterprise, or uses Gemini Code Assist for GitHub through Google Cloud, Gemini CLI access continues unchanged. The sunset only hits individual developers and small teams who were using the free or Pro tiers.

What this means for developers

Google is making a clear bet: the future of AI coding is not a terminal tool you run locally. It is a platform you plug into, with server-side orchestration, multi-agent routing, and tight IDE integration. Antigravity is that platform, and Gemini 3.5 Flash is the engine.

For developers already bought into Google's ecosystem, the transition may be smooth. Antigravity 2.0 is a full IDE, not just a CLI, and the unified backend means your agents work the same way in the terminal and the desktop app.

For everyone else, this feels like a classic Google move: build something people love, get them dependent on it, then pivot to a new product and leave the old one behind. The 3x price hike on the model that powers everything only adds to the sting.

The benchmarks say Gemini 3.5 Flash is a genuinely good model. The business decisions around it are what have developers questioning whether "good" is worth the cost.