Google is cutting access to its more capable Gemini models for free users and cheaper subscribers from 9 October.
According to 9to5Google those using Gemini without a Google AI subscription will be restricted to the Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite model. Access to Gemini 3.6 Flash and Gemini 3.1 Pro will disappear.
Google AI Plus subscribers will keep Flash-Lite and Flash, but they will lose access to Pro. The plan costs $4.99 a month. Google says affected AI Plus users will receive an email explaining when the changes take effect.
That leaves Gemini 3.1 Pro available to customers paying for Google AI Pro or AI Ultra, which apparently makes intelligence one of those features that improves dramatically when a credit card appears.
AI Pro costs $19.99 a month and will gain access to Deep Think, Google’s higher-compute reasoning mode. Until now, Deep Think has been limited to the more expensive $99.99 and $199.99 AI Ultra plans.
Google describes Deep Think as offering “maximum parallel reasoning”, with the model spending more computing resources on difficult requests. AI Pro and AI Ultra customers will continue to have access to Flash-Lite, Flash and Pro, so Google is concentrating the cuts at the free and cheaper end of its Gemini offering.
The changes follow Google’s move in May to compute-based usage limits, which shifted Gemini allowances away from straightforward prompt counts. Google appears to be preparing another change this month by adding low, medium and high effort levels for available Gemini models.
According to Google’s support information, increasing the effort setting “will increase the model’s ability to complete tasks and provide more thorough answers to queries, but will also use more of your limit.”
Gemini currently offers an “Extended thinking: Complex problem solving” option. The new effort levels would bring the consumer Gemini app closer to controls already available in Google AI Studio and Antigravity. Uncertainty remains around Gemini 4 Argon, Google’s newly announced frontier model.
Google has said Argon will initially be available to AI Ultra subscribers, but has not said whether it will eventually count as a Pro-class model or sit in another tier above it.
