Gemini 3.1 Pro, released February 19, 2026, is Google DeepMind's latest frontier model — posting leading benchmark scores on 13 of 16 standard evaluations and dramatically outperforming its predecessor on coding tasks.
Why It's in Trial
Gemini 3.1 Pro is a genuine leap over Gemini 2.5 Pro and represents Google returning to the frontier conversation in a serious way:
- SWE-bench Verified: 76.2% (resolving real GitHub issues)
- ARC-AGI-2: 77.1% — more than double Gemini 3 Pro's score
- GPQA Diamond: 94.3% (expert-level scientific knowledge)
- Beats Claude Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.2 on several benchmarks
The model can process entire codebases without RAG — you can feed in 50,000+ lines across multiple files and it maintains full context, which is a genuine competitive advantage.
Where It Stands Out
- Codebase ingestion: The 1M context window plus its ability to reason coherently over extremely long contexts make it uniquely powerful for large-project questions
- Pricing: Same cost as Gemini 3 Pro (Google gave users a major upgrade at no extra cost)
- Agentic coding: Strong performance in the Gemini CLI and Gemini Code Assist integrations
Tradeoffs
Some users report that for fine-grained instruction following and production-quality code generation, Claude and GPT-4 series still edge it out. The "AI laziness" problem (truncated answers, placeholder code) seen in Gemini 3.0 appears reduced but not fully resolved.
Pricing note (April–May 2026): Google removed the free tier for Gemini 3.1 Pro on April 1, 2026. It is now paid-only. Gemini 3 Flash and Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite retain free tiers.
Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite went GA on May 7, 2026 (launched in preview March 3, 2026). It is Google's cost-efficiency tier of the 3.1 family — optimized for ultra-low latency, high-volume pipelines, and agentic tool calling at scale. Secondary sources (OpenRouter, Artificial Analysis) report: $0.25/M input / $1.50/M output, 1M token context window, 381.9 tokens/sec output (64% faster than Gemini 2.5 Flash), and GPQA Diamond 86.9%. Source: Google Cloud Blog announcement (direct fetch blocked 403 — secondary sources agree on GA date and pricing).
How to Access It
- Google AI Studio — paid tier required as of April 1, 2026
- Gemini API (
gemini-3-1-promodel ID) - Gemini CLI — with Google AI Ultra subscription
- Cursor, JetBrains, and other third-party tools via API
Key Characteristics
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| License | Proprietary |
| Context window | 1,000,000 tokens |
| Pricing | $2.00 input / $12.00 output per 1M tokens (≤200K context); $4.00 / $18.00 above that threshold; 90% discount on cached context |
| Free tier | Removed April 1, 2026 |
| Provider | Google DeepMind |
| API model ID | gemini-3-1-pro |
Pricing sources: Multiple secondary sources (AI Pricing Guru, MetaCTO) confirm the $2.00/$12.00 structure and April 1 paid-only change. Primary Google docs (ai.google.dev, docs.cloud.google.com) returned HTTP 403 on direct fetch — verify at next session opportunity.