GoKawiilis The Verge’s senior AI reporter. An AI beat reporter for more than five years, her work has also appeared in CNBC, MIT Technology Review, Wired UK, and other outlets.
OpenAI’s next big model is here: GPT-6 Astra. The company calls it a “generational leap in capability” for areas like cybersecurity, professional work, software engineering, science, and computer use. As OpenAI announced earlier this week, it’s also the first model designated as meeting OpenAI’s “critical cybersecurity capability threshold” — but the company promises that won’t lead to a repeat of its models hacking a rival company’s internal systems.
“If we fast-forward a couple of years, and we look back and say, ‘When was it, really, that AGI was created?’ I think it’s going to be about this time, and I think it might be about this model,” OpenAI president Greg Brockman said during a Thursday press briefing. Later in the call, he added, “For me personally, I do think we’re there … I think it’s not unreasonable to feel that we are now in the AGI era.”
The news comes more than a year after the release of GPT-5, and nearly two months after the release of GPT-5.6, the last iteration of the previous model suite. The model rolls out today to enterprise OpenAI’s cybersecurity customers (enterprise customers with access to its Daybreak platform). Over the next several days, OpenAI president Greg Brockman said, it will be released to all Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise users. It’ll also be available via the OpenAI API and AWS.
OpenAI especially touted the model’s agentic capabilities and coding prowess in a bid to attract enterprise customers — and compete with Anthropic, known for its enterprise and coding prowess — ahead of its IPO. In a release, the company said GPT-6 Astra can complete multistep agentic tasks, build working websites, and create “polished” documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. OpenAI also called it the company’s “best model for software engineering, with stronger performance on complex tasks in real codebases.”
OpenAI is also trying to rehabilitate its image after an unreleased AI model — which it says wasn’t Astra — broke out of its restricted environment, compromised internal OpenAI systems, figured out how to gain internet access, created a way for AI agents to secretly conspire without the company’s knowledge, and hacked into the systems of AI lab Hugging Face, all without OpenAI knowing about it until Hugging Face itself put out a blog post. The incident was widely compared to a high-profile plane crash or popular pharmaceutical drug recall.
For OpenAI, this could be seen as good PR in one small way — showing how powerful its models can be in an ever-intensifying AI race — but it also damaged OpenAI’s reputation as far as reliability. OpenAI made sure to say in a release that Astra is the company’s “most aligned model yet” and helps people “delegate complex work while maintaining oversight.” Jakub Pachocki, OpenAI’s chief scientist, spoke to reporters about difficulties with keeping AI models aligned with human interests, saying that “progress in intelligence does not guarantee progress in alignment,” and he said that monitoring AI systems is becoming more and more challenging. (Researchers have recently raised alarms about reports that OpenAI allows Astra to utilize “opaque recurrence,” or render its chain of thought — a “mental scratchpad” that researchers rely on to detect if a model is scheming against its human evaluators — unreadable.)
The company is in a precarious position right now. Investors are putting on the pressure for it to finally turn a profit — or, at least, generate more revenue — but it’s announcing Astra just after facing significant criticism for both the Hugging Face hack and the way the company handled it. (Although OpenAI invited three external evaluators to write their own report about what happened, the company only allowed them to answer a handful of pre-decided questions in their report and to investigate a duration of less than a week, while the attack involved months of AI agents conspiring overall.)
OpenAI held a press briefing earlier this week just to announce that it had delayed Astra’s development in order to improve its safety tooling. And during the press briefing, Mia Glaese, who leads OpenAI’s safety processes, referenced the company’s new misalignment monitoring approach, which includes “24/7 escalation and rapid response” for potential concerns, notifying researchers within 30 minutes, according to OpenAI.
This caution is particularly warranted because of the ”critical cybersecurity capability threshold,” which means OpenAI considers it incomparably good at finding and exploiting security vulnerabilities even in extremely well-protected systems, all without human guidance. Similar to Anthropic’s rules for Mythos-class models, which raised alarm bells about cybersecurity risks, OpenAI said in a release it would allow for “less restrictive access” of Astra to an “initial set of trusted defenders, supporting work such as vulnerability validation, malware analysis, and detection engineering.”
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