GoKawiilGiven concerns that exposure to historical software vulnerabilities may have affected benchmark results, we also evaluated Astra on two novel benchmarks. For one, we built an internal “ExploitBench (June–August 2026)” evaluation to test exploit development using vulnerabilities from the previous three months.14 Astra achieved substantially higher arbitrary code-execution rates than GPT‑5.6 Sol on this dataset while using far fewer output tokens. During the evaluation, Astra even discovered and used two previously unknown zero-day vulnerabilities. We are disclosing both vulnerabilities to their maintainers.
We also tested Astra on SRE-Bench15, a benchmark that measures whether models can reverse engineer software binaries to understand its core logic without access to raw source code. Astra solved 88.0% of tasks in a single attempt and 99.2% within four attempts, compared with 55.9% and 68.7% for GPT‑5.6 Sol, respectively.
Beyond benchmarks, expert-led assessments found that Astra, when run without production safeguards, could use previously unknown vulnerabilities to achieve arbitrary code execution in hardened browsers and create privilege-escalation exploits for hardened operating-systems.
As we discussed in The Defender’s Window , frontier cyber capabilities can help defenders find weaknesses faster, but they also make those weaknesses easier to exploit, raising the urgency for defenders to adapt. With the version of Astra launching today, defenders can use it to complete tasks such as secure code review and patching.
However, Astra will refuse to comply with more advanced cybersecurity tasks such as creating proof-of-concept exploits for vulnerabilities. Through OpenAI Daybreak , we plan to expand access and roll out less restrictive safeguards in the coming weeks. This will enable more defensive workflows, including vulnerability and proof-of-concept validation, malware analysis, and detection engineering.