In two days Venice opened its doors to frontier models: Gemini 4 Argon, Google’s reasoning model, has been live on the platform since 13 October, and all Claude models are available on the Venice API at Anthropic’s list price. The difference, Venice says, is not the price: it is that the provider cannot see who is asking.

Frontier without a subscription

Gemini 4 Argon arrives with a million tokens of context, native vision and adjustable reasoning levels, at 2.50 dollars per million tokens for input and 12.50 for output. No Google account or subscription is needed: you pay per token. The same goes for the Claude family, exposed through an OpenAI-compatible API: changing the base URL and the model identifier is enough for existing code to keep working. It is a positioning move, not just a catalogue update.

Anonymous does not mean private

Here the platform is more honest than much of the competition, and it is worth saying so. Venice distinguishes two modes: in «Anonymous» the proxy hides the user’s identity, but the text of the prompt still reaches the lab hosting the model — Google, Anthropic or OpenAI. It is the «Private» mode, the default one, that does not retain prompt and response. Anyone reading «available anonymously» and taking it to mean «nobody sees what I write» is reading the wrong page: Venice states this explicitly in the model documentation. Anonymity protects identity, not content. The distinction is narrow, but that is exactly why it holds.

The token as thermometer

On the economic side, VVV is trading around 23 dollars, down about 12% over seven days, with a market capitalisation above a billion. The tokenomics design, however, keeps tightening: emissions fell from 3 to 2 million VVV a year across two cuts, in September and October, and 5 dollars out of every 100 spent on API credits are used to buy and burn VVV on the secondary market. Venice reports over 33.7 million VVV burned, roughly 42.9% of the original supply of 100 million, while the DIEM target has risen from 38,000 to 40,000.

The bet is that access to the world’s best models can be sold without selling the identity of those who use them. Whether the market will reward the nuance or settle for the slogan remains to be seen.

Verified sources: venice.ai/models/gemini-4-argon and docs.venice.ai (models, prices, privacy tiers, consulted on 2026-10-15); venice.ai/models and docs.venice.ai/models/overview (Claude catalogue); X posts @AskVenice of 13-14 October 2026; venice.ai/blog/tokenomics-update-credit-burns-and-diem-supply-expansion and venice.ai/blog/programmatic-vvv-buy-and-burn; cryptopolitan.com and coinmarketcap.com (cumulative burns 33.7M VVV, ~42.9%); coingecko.com/en/coins/venice-token (VVV price, consulted on 2026-10-15).