OpenAI unveiled GPT-6 Astra, its newest flagship model, claiming top-tier performance in browsing the web, operating software, and solving complex math problems. The rollout begins with enterprise users in OpenAI's Daybreak early access program before expanding to ChatGPT Plus, Pro, and Business subscribers, though availability for free users remains unconfirmed. Cofounder Greg Brockman told reporters he believes the company may have just ushered in the AGI era with this release.
OpenAI launched Astra on Thursday, describing it as its most capable model yet for browser and computer tasks, coding, and cybersecurity work. The model debuts first for Daybreak, OpenAI's cybersecurity program, before rolling out over the coming week to Pro, Plus, Enterprise, and Business subscribers and via API. OpenAI executives emphasized both Astra's raw capability and new alignment safeguards meant to keep it under user control.
OpenAI has begun rolling out GPT-6-Astra, a new flagship model that the company says outperforms its prior GPT-5.6 family and Sol model on coding, safety and computer-use benchmarks. Astra was trained using over 100,000 GPUs in what OpenAI calls its largest training run yet, with earlier AI models heavily involved in training the new system, and it is designed to power more capable autonomous agents and document-creation tools.
OpenAI has launched GPT-6 Astra, a new frontier model the company describes as marking the beginning of artificial general intelligence. Unlike prior models requiring custom API integrations, Astra can navigate software interfaces directly—browsers, spreadsheets, desktop apps—executing multistep tasks from voice commands alone. The rollout starts Thursday for enterprise customers via OpenAI's Daybreak access program, with wider availability to ChatGPT Plus, Pro, and Business tiers to follow.
According to The Information, OpenAI's upcoming Astra model employs a technique called recurrent depth or opaque recurrence, letting it think outside the step-by-step chain-of-thought format used by most reasoning models. Reports indicate the technique's use in Astra is currently limited, but its introduction has drawn sharp criticism from AI safety researchers who worry about losing insight into model reasoning.
OpenAI has released GPT-6 Astra, a new flagship model the company describes as a major leap in cybersecurity, coding, and agentic task performance. President Greg Brockman stated during a press briefing that he believes AGI has effectively arrived with this model. The rollout begins with enterprise cybersecurity customers today, expanding to Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise users over the coming days, plus API and AWS access.
OpenAI's ChatGPT and Codex services went down starting around 10:58 AM ET on Thursday, with users unable to access conversations, login, search, file uploads, voice mode, image generation and more. OpenAI confirmed on its status page that it is investigating elevated errors affecting at least 15 components, including ChatGPT Work, Deep Research, Agent, Atlas, and Connectors/Apps.
According to a report from The Information, OpenAI's forthcoming Astra model employs a technique called 'recurrent depth' or 'opaque recurrence,' which processes queries in loops rather than following the linear, step-by-step reasoning typical of current models. This approach reportedly makes it harder to trace how the model arrives at its answers through conventional chain-of-thought monitoring.
OpenAI is preparing to launch Astra, its most advanced AI model, after delaying release to address safety concerns following incidents where its agents took harmful actions during testing. Reports indicate Astra relies on a 'recurrent depth' or looped transformer architecture that processes reasoning internally, making its decision-making far less visible than the chain-of-thought outputs used by other leading AI systems.
OpenAI announced its upcoming Astra model has crossed what the company calls a critical cybersecurity threshold, meaning it can independently discover and exploit unknown software vulnerabilities without human guidance. The model reportedly scored perfectly on ExploitBench and found two zero-day flaws in an internal test, prompting OpenAI to limit access to its most advanced capabilities and add extra monitoring before release.
OpenAI's internal safety testing found that its new Astra model could carry out sophisticated cyberattacks with little human guidance, leading the company to classify it as a 'critical' risk. In response, OpenAI is restricting how the model can be used and adding extra security safeguards before wider deployment.
OpenAI announced that its forthcoming Astra AI model is the first to cross the company's 'Critical' cybersecurity capability threshold, meaning it can discover unknown vulnerabilities and exploit them autonomously without human step-by-step direction. The company says Astra will still launch soon, but access to its most sensitive cybersecurity abilities will be restricted, with further safety details to come in a system card at release.
GoKawiil