Google's Gemini 3.5 Flash follows Anthropic and OpenAI in making newer AI models significantly pricier

Google’s Gemini 3.5 Flash delivers better benchmark and agent-task results than Gemini 3 Flash.

But Artificial Analysis says it uses far more tokens, making real-world costs about 5.5x higher than the old Flash model.

On benchmarked agent workloads, Gemini 3.5 Flash also ends up costing more than Gemini 3.1 Pro.

The report highlights a wider trend: lower per-token pricing does not always mean lower actual AI spend.