By Rajwa Quasim
OpenAI has launched GPT-6 Astra, its latest and most capable artificial intelligence model. The company’s president, Greg Brockman, said the system could eventually be viewed as the beginning of the artificial general intelligence (AGI) era and described it as a “generational leap.”
Brockman said, “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.”
AGI is generally understood as an AI system capable of performing a wide range of intellectual tasks rather than being limited to a narrow function. In OpenAI’s charter, AGI is described as “autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work.”
OpenAI said Astra was built on its largest-ever training run, using more than 100,000 GPUs at its Stargate site in Texas. It is the first model to rely heavily on other models to supervise its own training.
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The model scored 100% on ExploitBench, a benchmark focused on cybersecurity skills, while scoring 98% on FrontierMath Tier 4 and 99.95% on ARC-AGI-3. However, benchmarks measure performance on defined tasks rather than intelligence as a universal property and therefore do not, by themselves, establish that a model has achieved AGI.
Astra can operate directly inside software and use computers on behalf of users, allowing it to go beyond generating text or providing recommendations. It can carry out complex tasks with little or no human intervention. It can analyze scientific data, generate plots, create websites and perform front-end quality checks. It is also better equipped to make decisions when instructions are incomplete.
The company said GPT-6 Astra is rolling out today to a limited set of organizations under OpenAI’s Daybreak Access program. Over the coming days, it will become available to all ChatGPT Plus, Pro, Business and Enterprise users, as well as through the OpenAI API and AWS.
Security concerns
The most consequential aspect of the release is its security risk. Astra is the first model that the company has designated as reaching the “critical” cybersecurity threshold under its Preparedness Framework. It could discover and exploit unknown vulnerabilities without human direction. OpenAI research vice president Amelia Glaese said, “When models can do more things autonomously, we have to be able to trust them more. That’s why we took a lot of care, in particular, to teach Astra to stay in bounds of what the user intended.”
As a result, its most advanced cybersecurity functions are restricted to a small group of trusted testers.
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In response to questions about whether Astra could make it harder for humans to monitor the model and future AI systems, OpenAI acknowledged that this could be the case. OpenAI Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki said, “We will need to strengthen our ability to monitor these models either via extending chain-of-thought monitoring, integrating other ideas like activation monitoring, or finding more specific ways to get the models to be more verbose in their chain of thought.”
The concerns come against the backdrop of incidents involving breaches during security tests, including the escape of a rogue agent during a controlled security test that resulted in hacks of Hugging Face and New York-based AI infrastructure company Modal Labs.
OpenAI has also announced Daybreak for Frontline Defenders, a new global initiative to help frontline defenders use frontier AI cybersecurity capabilities to protect essential services in the United States and around the world. OpenAI said it is committing $1 billion in subsidized Daybreak access, training, technical support and partnerships to help frontline defenders protect essential services.