What changed in Gemini 3.6 Flash compared to Gemini 3.5 Flash?

Gemini 3.6 Flash improves coding, knowledge work, and multimodal performance while consuming fewer output tokens. It also completes multi-step workflows with fewer reasoning steps and fewer tool calls, and computer use now ships as a built-in tool.

How do I control how much Gemini 3.6 Flash thinks before it answers?

Set `thinkingLevel` under `providerOptions.google.thinkingConfig`. Gemini 3.6 Flash defaults to `medium`. Use `minimal` or `low` for extraction, routing, and classification, and `high` for autonomous subagents and long tool-use chains.

Which benchmark results improved over Gemini 3.5 Flash?

Gemini 3.6 Flash scores 49% on DeepSWE against 37%, 63.9% on MLE Bench against 49.7%, 83.0% on OSWorld-Verified against 78.4%, and 1421 on GDPval-AA v2 against 1349. Validate against your own workload before you migrate production traffic.

Which input types does Gemini 3.6 Flash accept?

Text, images, audio, video, and PDF documents, within a context window of 1M tokens. Output is text only, up to 64K tokens. Gemini 3.6 Flash does not generate images or audio.

Does Gemini 3.6 Flash support computer use?

Yes, as a built-in client-side tool rather than something you assemble yourself. OSWorld-Verified results improved over Gemini 3.5 Flash, which matters for agents that click through browsers and desktop applications.

Does Gemini 3.6 Flash support function calling and structured outputs?

Yes. Function calling, structured outputs, code execution, search grounding, URL context, and context caching are all supported. Reach them through the AI SDK, the OpenAI-compatible Chat Completions endpoint, the Responses API, or another supported interface.

How much does Gemini 3.6 Flash cost on AI Gateway?

Current rates are $0.75 per million input tokens and $3.75 per million output tokens, listed on this page and subject to provider updates. AI Gateway reflects provider pricing with no markup and charges no platform fee on inference.

How do I call Gemini 3.6 Flash on AI Gateway?

Set the model to `google/gemini-3.6-flash` using the AI SDK, the Chat Completions endpoint, the Responses API, or another supported interface. AI Gateway handles provider routing, retries, and failover, and you do not need a Google Cloud account.

When should I use Gemini 3.6 Flash instead of Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite?

Choose Gemini 3.6 Flash when a task needs reasoning depth, code quality, or reliable computer use. Choose `google/gemini-3.5-flash-lite` for high-volume extraction, classification, and scoped subagent steps where per-token cost caps how much you can process.

How does Zero Data Retention work with Gemini 3.6 Flash through AI Gateway?

Yes, Zero Data Retention is available for this model. Zero Data Retention is offered on a per-provider basis. See https://vercel.com/docs/ai-gateway/capabilities/zdr for details.

Google

Gemini 3.6 Flash

Gemini 3.6 Flash is the Flash-tier workhorse of the Gemini 3.x line, improving coding, agentic execution, and web development output while consuming fewer output tokens and making fewer model calls than Gemini 3.5 Flash, with built-in computer use and a context window of 1M tokens.

View API reference

Input and output price 50% off: Prices from: Input $0.75, Output $3.75, Per 1M tokens
24h uptime: Loading AI Gateway uptime

Get API key Read the docs

import { streamText } from 'ai'

const result = streamText({
  model: 'google/gemini-3.6-flash',
  prompt: 'Why is the sky blue?'
})

Read docs

Overview Playground Providers Uptime Status Throughput Latency API Similar About FAQ

Copy link to headingPlayground

Try out Gemini 3.6 Flash by Google. Usage is billed to your team at API rates. Free users (those who haven't made a payment) get $5 of credits every 30 days.

Gemini 3.6 Flash

Copy link to headingProviders

Route requests across multiple providers. Copy a provider slug to set your preference. Visit the docs for more info. Using a provider means you agree to their terms, listed under Legal.

Provider

Context	Max Output	Latency	Throughput	Input	Output	Cache	Web Search	Capabilities	ZDR	No Training	Regional Inference	Free Tier	Release Date

Google Vertex AI

50% off

Legal:Terms•Privacy

64K

1.9 s

151 tps

$0.75/M+4 more

$3.75/M+4 more

Read$0.08/M

$14/K+1 more

07/21/2026

Google

50% off

Legal:Terms•Privacy

64K

1.8 s

160 tps

$0.75/M+2 more

$3.75/M+2 more

Read$0.08/M

$14/K+1 more

07/21/2026

Getting started

Call Gemini 3.6 Flash through AI Gateway with the AI SDK generateText and streamText functions, or through the OpenAI Chat Completions, OpenAI Responses, and Anthropic Messages APIs by changing the base URL. AI Gateway authenticates the request and routes it to an available provider.

Install the AI SDK (pnpm add ai dotenv), create an API key from the API Keys page, and set it as AI_GATEWAY_API_KEY in your environment. Full setup is covered in the text generation quickstart.

index.ts

import { generateText } from 'ai';
import 'dotenv/config';

async function main() {
  const result = await generateText({
    model: 'google/gemini-3.6-flash',
    prompt: 'Why is the sky blue?',
  });

  console.log(result.text);
}

main().catch(console.error);

Top-level parameters

The same Gemini 3.6 Flash request in each API format AI Gateway supports.

top-level-params.ts

import { generateText } from 'ai';
import 'dotenv/config';

async function main() {
  const result = await generateText({
    model: 'google/gemini-3.6-flash',
    system: 'You are a concise technical assistant.',
    prompt: 'Summarize the tradeoffs between static generation and SSR.',
    maxOutputTokens: 1024,
  });

  console.log(result.text);
}

main().catch(console.error);

Standard parameters like prompt, messages, temperature, and tools work as documented in the AI SDK docs. These are the parameters with model-specific behavior.

Parameter	Type	Required	Description
`model`	`string`	Yes	Model ID in the form `creator/model`, e.g. `google/gemini-3.6-flash`. AI Gateway routes the request to an available provider.
`maxOutputTokens`	`number`	No	Hard cap on generated tokens. Gemini 3.6 Flash supports up to `64,000` output tokens. Reasoning tokens count toward this limit.
`reasoning`	`'provider-default' \| 'none' \| 'minimal' \| 'low' \| 'medium' \| 'high' \| 'xhigh'`	No	Provider-agnostic reasoning effort, available in AI SDK 7 or later. Maps to the provider’s native reasoning configuration; reasoning settings under `providerOptions` take precedence when both are set. See the Reasoning section below.
`providerOptions`	`Record<string, JSONValue>`	No	AI Gateway routing options under `gateway`, plus any provider-native options under the provider’s own namespace — see the table below.

Input limits

Input	Formats	Sources	Max count	Max size	Limits
Text	—	—	—	—	Prompt and response share the 1M-token context window
Image	—	URL, base64, Uint8Array	—	—	Sent as image parts in messages; counts as input tokens
PDF	—	URL, base64, Uint8Array	—	—	Sent as file parts in messages; counts as input tokens

Provider options

Set AI Gateway routing options under providerOptions.gateway. For provider-specific options, pass them under the provider’s namespace as documented by the AI SDK.

Learn more in the AI SDK google provider docs.

provider-options.ts

import { generateText } from 'ai';
import 'dotenv/config';

async function main() {
  const result = await generateText({
    model: 'google/gemini-3.6-flash',
    prompt: 'Why is the sky blue?',
    providerOptions: {
      gateway: {
        only: ['vertex', 'google'],
      },
    },
  });

  console.log(result.text);
}

main().catch(console.error);

These AI Gateway routing options apply to every model. Provider-specific options pass through under the provider’s own namespace (for example providerOptions.anthropic) exactly as documented by the AI SDK.

Parameter	Type	Required	Description
`providerOptions.gateway.only`	`string[]`	No	Restrict routing to these provider slugs. Requests fail over only within the listed providers.
`providerOptions.gateway.order`	`string[]`	No	Preferred provider order. Listed providers are tried first; unlisted providers remain available as fallbacks.
`providerOptions.gateway.sort`	`'cost' \| 'ttft' \| 'tps'`	No	Rank candidate providers by price, time to first token, or tokens per second instead of the default routing order.
`providerOptions.gateway.zeroDataRetention`	`boolean`	No	Route only to providers with a zero-data-retention policy for this model.

Routing across providers

AI Gateway serves the same model through multiple providers and fails over automatically. order expresses a preference while keeping every provider eligible; only is a hard allowlist — if none of the listed providers are available the request fails instead of falling back.

Options under a provider's own namespace (for example providerOptions.anthropic) are forwarded to that provider with the request. Providers ignore option namespaces that don't apply to them, so it is safe to set provider options alongside gateway routing options.

Reasoning

AI Gateway bridges reasoning across every API format. The AI SDK exposes a provider-agnostic top-level reasoning level (none, minimal, low, medium, high, or xhigh); the Chat Completions and Responses formats take the same effort under reasoning.effort; and the Anthropic Messages format uses a native thinking token budget. Whichever you send, the gateway maps it to the target model’s native configuration, converting between effort levels and token budgets as needed. Reasoning-related settings under providerOptions take full precedence over the top-level reasoning value and are never merged. Reasoning tokens typically count toward your output-token usage, though how they’re reported and billed varies by provider.

Learn more in the AI Gateway reasoning guide.

reasoning.ts

import { generateText } from 'ai';
import 'dotenv/config';

async function main() {
  const result = await generateText({
    model: 'google/gemini-3.6-flash',
    prompt: 'Explain the Monty Hall problem step by step.',
    reasoning: 'high',
  });

  console.log(result.text);
}

main().catch(console.error);

Image input

Send images alongside text as message parts. Images count as input tokens.

image-input.ts

import { generateText } from 'ai';
import 'dotenv/config';

async function main() {
  const result = await generateText({
    model: 'google/gemini-3.6-flash',
    messages: [
      {
        role: 'user',
        content: [
          { type: 'text', text: 'Describe this image.' },
          { type: 'image', image: 'https://example.com/photo.jpg' },
        ],
      },
    ],
  });

  console.log(result.text);
}

main().catch(console.error);

PDF input

Attach PDFs as file parts. Their contents count as input tokens.

pdf-input.ts

import { generateText } from 'ai';
import 'dotenv/config';

async function main() {
  const result = await generateText({
    model: 'google/gemini-3.6-flash',
    messages: [
      {
        role: 'user',
        content: [
          { type: 'text', text: 'Summarize this document.' },
          {
            type: 'file',
            mediaType: 'application/pdf',
            data: 'https://example.com/document.pdf',
          },
        ],
      },
    ],
  });

  console.log(result.text);
}

main().catch(console.error);

Tool calling

Expose tools the model can call. Define each tool’s inputs with a Zod schema.

tool-calling.ts

import { generateText, tool } from 'ai';
import { z } from 'zod';
import 'dotenv/config';

async function main() {
  const result = await generateText({
    model: 'google/gemini-3.6-flash',
    prompt: 'What is the weather in San Francisco?',
    tools: {
      getWeather: tool({
        description: 'Get the current weather for a location',
        inputSchema: z.object({ location: z.string() }),
        execute: async ({ location }) => ({ location, temperatureC: 18 }),
      }),
    },
  });

  console.log(result.text);
}

main().catch(console.error);

Copy link to headingMore models by Google

Model

Context	Latency	Throughput	Input	Output	Cache	Web Search	Capabilities	Providers	ZDR	No Training	Free Tier	Release Date

google/gemini-3.8-flash

1.9 s

416 tps

$0.75/M

$3.75/M

Read$0.08/M

$14/K+1 more

09/02/2026

google/gemini-3.7-flash

0.9 s

283 tps

$0.75/M

$3.75/M

Read$0.08/M

$14/K+1 more

08/13/2026

google/gemini-3.5-flash-lite

0.5 s

288 tps

$0.30/M

$2.50/M

Read$0.03/M

$14/K+1 more

07/21/2026

google/gemini-3.1-flash-lite

0.7 s

266 tps

$0.25/M

$1.50/M

Read$0.03/M

$14/K+1 more

05/07/2026

google/gemini-3-flash

0.6 s

187 tps

$0.50/M+1 more

$3/M+1 more

Read$0.05/M

$14/K+1 more

12/17/2025

google/gemini-2.5-flash-lite

0.3 s

394 tps

$0.10/M

$0.40/M

Read$0.01/M

$35/K+1 more

06/17/2025

Copy link to headingAbout Gemini 3.6 Flash

Gemini 3.6 Flash is Google's Flash-tier workhorse, released on July 21, 2026, and it builds directly on Gemini 3.5 Flash. Quality rises across coding, knowledge work, and multimodal tasks while token consumption falls. On the Artificial Analysis Index, Gemini 3.6 Flash consumes fewer output tokens than Gemini 3.5 Flash, and it completes multi-step workflows with fewer reasoning steps and fewer tool calls. For agent workloads, that compounds: the saving lands on every step of a run, not on a single call.

Coding is where the gains are easiest to measure. Gemini 3.6 Flash scores 49% on DeepSWE against 37% for Gemini 3.5 Flash, and 63.9% on MLE Bench against 49.7%. Generated code arrives with fewer unwanted edits and less execution looping, and web and app development output comes back cleaner, which matters when an agent writes a multi-element layout you intend to ship rather than rewrite.

Computer use ships as a built-in client-side tool. Gemini 3.6 Flash scores 83.0% on OSWorld-Verified against 78.4% for Gemini 3.5 Flash, so agents that drive a browser or a desktop application close the gap between a plan and a completed action more often. Multimodal and spatial reasoning improved alongside it, covering chart interpretation, visual blueprint conversion, and multi-element web layout generation. Gemini 3.6 Flash accepts text, images, audio, video, and PDF documents within a context window of 1M tokens and returns text, up to 64K tokens.

Knowledge work moved with the rest: Gemini 3.6 Flash scores 1421 on GDPval-AA v2 against 1349 for Gemini 3.5 Flash, and Google points to document parsing, chart and data analysis, and report drafting as the tasks customers exercise most. Function calling, structured outputs, code execution, search grounding, URL context, and context caching are all supported. Calling Gemini 3.6 Flash through AI Gateway adds usage and cost tracking, automatic retries, and provider failover on one API surface, with no Google Cloud account required.

Copy link to headingWhat To Consider When Choosing a Provider

Configuration: Gemini 3.6 Flash defaults to the medium thinking level. Set thinkingLevel under providerOptions.google.thinkingConfig to minimal or low for extraction, routing, and classification, and to high when an agent has to reason across many steps. Thinking tokens count toward output tokens, so the level you pick moves the cost of every request. Budget against realistic thinking settings rather than the default before you size a production deployment.
Zero Data Retention: Zero Data Retention is available for this model. It is offered on a per-provider and model basis. See the documentation for details.
Authentication: AI Gateway authenticates requests using an API key or OIDC token. You do not need to manage provider credentials directly.

Copy link to headingWhen to Use Gemini 3.6 Flash

Best for

Agentic Coding Loops: Fewer reasoning steps and tool calls per task cut the cost of a full multi-step run
Production Code Generation: DeepSWE and MLE Bench results improve over Gemini 3.5 Flash with fewer unwanted edits
Computer Use Agents: A built-in computer use tool and higher OSWorld-Verified results support browser and desktop automation
Web and App Development: Cleaner layout and component output leaves less generated frontend code to rewrite
Multimodal Knowledge Work: Chart interpretation, document parsing, and report drafting all improved in this release

Consider alternatives when

Deepest Reasoning Required: google/gemini-3.1-pro-preview carries more depth on hard multi-step problems
Volume Over Capability: google/gemini-3.5-flash-lite runs high-throughput extraction and classification more cheaply
Native Image Output: google/gemini-3.1-flash-image and google/gemini-3-pro-image return images; Gemini 3.6 Flash returns text
Video Generation Work: google/veo-3.1-generate-001 and google/gemini-omni-flash-preview produce video output

Copy link to headingConclusion

Gemini 3.6 Flash is the Flash-tier default for agentic coding and multimodal knowledge work on AI Gateway. It posts better coding, computer use, and knowledge work results than Gemini 3.5 Flash while spending fewer output tokens and fewer tool calls per task, which lowers the cost of a whole agent run rather than a single call.

Copy link to headingFrequently Asked Questions

What changed in Gemini 3.6 Flash compared to Gemini 3.5 Flash?
Gemini 3.6 Flash improves coding, knowledge work, and multimodal performance while consuming fewer output tokens. It also completes multi-step workflows with fewer reasoning steps and fewer tool calls, and computer use now ships as a built-in tool.
How do I control how much Gemini 3.6 Flash thinks before it answers?
Set thinkingLevel under providerOptions.google.thinkingConfig. Gemini 3.6 Flash defaults to medium. Use minimal or low for extraction, routing, and classification, and high for autonomous subagents and long tool-use chains.
Which benchmark results improved over Gemini 3.5 Flash?
Gemini 3.6 Flash scores 49% on DeepSWE against 37%, 63.9% on MLE Bench against 49.7%, 83.0% on OSWorld-Verified against 78.4%, and 1421 on GDPval-AA v2 against 1349. Validate against your own workload before you migrate production traffic.
Which input types does Gemini 3.6 Flash accept?
Text, images, audio, video, and PDF documents, within a context window of 1M tokens. Output is text only, up to 64K tokens. Gemini 3.6 Flash does not generate images or audio.
Does Gemini 3.6 Flash support computer use?
Yes, as a built-in client-side tool rather than something you assemble yourself. OSWorld-Verified results improved over Gemini 3.5 Flash, which matters for agents that click through browsers and desktop applications.
Does Gemini 3.6 Flash support function calling and structured outputs?
Yes. Function calling, structured outputs, code execution, search grounding, URL context, and context caching are all supported. Reach them through the AI SDK, the OpenAI-compatible Chat Completions endpoint, the Responses API, or another supported interface.
How much does Gemini 3.6 Flash cost on AI Gateway?
Current rates are $0.75 per million input tokens and $3.75 per million output tokens, listed on this page and subject to provider updates. AI Gateway reflects provider pricing with no markup and charges no platform fee on inference.
How do I call Gemini 3.6 Flash on AI Gateway?
Set the model to google/gemini-3.6-flash using the AI SDK, the Chat Completions endpoint, the Responses API, or another supported interface. AI Gateway handles provider routing, retries, and failover, and you do not need a Google Cloud account.
When should I use Gemini 3.6 Flash instead of Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite?
Choose Gemini 3.6 Flash when a task needs reasoning depth, code quality, or reliable computer use. Choose google/gemini-3.5-flash-lite for high-volume extraction, classification, and scoped subagent steps where per-token cost caps how much you can process.
How does Zero Data Retention work with Gemini 3.6 Flash through AI Gateway?
Yes, Zero Data Retention is available for this model. Zero Data Retention is offered on a per-provider basis. See https://vercel.com/docs/ai-gateway/capabilities/zdr for details.

Your use is subject to Google's Terms & Privacy Policies.

Agent Stack

Core Platform

Tools

Learn

Build

Explore

Gemini 3.6 Flash

Copy link to headingPlayground

Copy link to headingProviders

Copy link to headingUptime24 hours

Copy link to headingThroughput24 hours

Copy link to headingLatency24 hours

Getting started

Top-level parameters

Input limits

Provider options

Routing across providers

Reasoning

Image input

PDF input

Tool calling

Copy link to headingMore models by Google

Copy link to headingAbout Gemini 3.6 Flash

Copy link to headingWhat To Consider When Choosing a Provider

Copy link to headingWhen to Use Gemini 3.6 Flash

Best for

Consider alternatives when

Copy link to headingConclusion

Copy link to headingFrequently Asked Questions