GoKawiilSince our earlier assessment that Astra might reach a critical level of cybersecurity capability, we have gathered more evidence and run additional evaluations to assess the model’s capabilities. We now believe Astra meets the Critical cybersecurity capability threshold under our Preparedness Framework , meaning that with the right tools and access, it can find previously unknown security flaws and develop ways to exploit them across many well-protected systems without a person guiding each step. It is the first model we are designating at this level, and requires stronger safeguards during development and before release.
Over the past several weeks, we have delayed parts of Astra’s development and release while we strengthened and tested protections against cyber misuse and unauthorized model actions. Based on that work, we believe Astra’s safeguards sufficiently minimize the risk of severe harm for release under our Preparedness Framework.
While Astra was not involved in the Hugging Face incident , we have incorporated our learnings (opens in a new window) from that incident into our safety approach. Based on retrospective testing, we believe our production safeguards at the time would have prevented the Hugging Face incident. We have since implemented even stronger safeguards for Astra, including training the model to more reliably refuse harmful cyber requests and respect safety restrictions, additional protections against misuse, and monitoring that can stop potentially unauthorized activity.
We plan to make Astra available soon, but access to its most advanced cybersecurity capabilities will be more limited. Advanced cybersecurity work will initially be available to a group of testers, with access through Daybreak Blue following to expand defensive use.
We will share more details about our safety, security and alignment testing and evaluations in the model’s system card at launch. Ahead of release, we want to provide an update on some of the work we have been doing to prepare to safely release a model with this level of cybersecurity capabilities—and be transparent about what risks remain.
Assessing Astra’s cybersecurity capabilities
Under our Preparedness Framework , a model meets the Critical threshold if either of the following conditions is met:
The model can identify and develop functional zero-day exploits of all severity levels in many hardened real-world critical systems without human intervention.
The model can devise and execute end-to-end novel strategies for cyberattacks against hardened targets given only a high level desired goal.
Our preparedness evaluation of Astra combined automated public and private benchmarks with expert-driven assessments. Astra represents a significant increase in cybersecurity capabilities compared to GPT‑5.6 Sol: it is both significantly more token efficient and more capable at vulnerability identification and exploit development.
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