In the shadow of the Hugging Face security breach, OpenAI's most powerful model is about to be loose in the world, but with new safeguards.
On Thursday, OpenAI unveiled GPT-6 Astra, its next-generation model that it characterizes as a "generational leap in capability." Starting today, it will be coming to a limited set of organizations, including those in the Daybreak Access program and then rolling out to ChatGPT customers on Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, API, and AWS "over the coming days," according to the company.
In a briefing with the press, OpenAI President Greg Brockman said that with Astra, "It's not unreasonable to feel that we are now in the AGI era," and that the release is just the beginning. "I feel like there is a qualitative shift we've gone through," said Brockman. "I think that it is a significant moment, but it is more about the continuum than it is about any individual point along the way."
Notably, the API cost for the new model will cost $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output tokens. That's the exact same price as Anthropic's Mythos/Fable 5 and 5.1 and makes Astra one of the most expensive models on the market. However, OpenAI emphasizes that Astra's leap in intelligence causes it to use "substantially fewer total tokens per task" in multiple scenarios. So this is also an efficiency play from that perspective. In real-world usage, we'll have to see how well that translates to lower overall costs.
As for its capabilities, OpenAI noted a number of improvements that Astra offers over its predecessors and competitors:
- The company has called Astra "the world's best computer use model," with the best speed, accuracy and safety on the market, and capabilities in domains ranging from circuit board design to financial modeling to game design.
- The model is also its best yet for professional work, including creating more usable presentations, spreadsheets and documents, and makes leaps in scientific discovery, mathematics, and health research.
- OpenAI also says Astra is "the best model for software engineering to date," outranking GPT-5.6 Sol and Claude Fable 5.1 on DeepSWE v1.1, a benchmark for complex software-engineering tasks in real codebases.
And of course, OpenAI couldn't release the most powerful model on the market without addressing the elephants in the room: Cybersecurity and alignment. Given the model meeting the "critical" threshold for cyber capabilities under its preparedness framework, the company said that Astra will refuse to comply with advanced cybersecurity tasks, such as exploit discovery, and features stronger protections against cyber misuse. Additionally, OpenAI is rolling out less restrictive access to Astra for an initial set of members of the Daybreak program for tasks such as vulnerability validation, malware analysis and detection engineering.
As for safety, the company said Astra is its "most aligned model," with improvements in respecting task boundaries and transparent communication. The company said that Astra is three times less likely than GPT-5.6 Sol to inaccurately represent its capabilities, and causes fewer unintended outcomes than previous models.
However, OpenAI found that Astra’s written reasoning is harder to monitor than GPT-5.6 Sol’s. Jakub Pachocki, chief scientist at OpenAI, said in the briefing that as these models become more intelligent, "monitorability is getting more challenging." This is because the smarter a model becomes, the less language reasoning it needs to be able to complete tasks.
"We see monitoring is critical, and we take this trend seriously, and we believe monitoring is still a very core technique for Astra, but for future models improving it … is a research priority," said Pachocki.
Our Deeper View
Why would OpenAI release a more expensive model at a time when all of the major players in the ecosystem (including OpenAI) have been driving down token costs? OpenAI has now put itself into a position where the market expects it to constantly release something bigger and better than before to be worth that trillion-dollar price tag. And while OpenAI's mission is to democratize intelligence, even showing users in the briefing the model's computer-use capability to order food, book tennis courts and sell furniture, with its price point and power, the reality is that Astra is not meant for everyone. It is best suited to handle the most powerful and critical tasks that organizations have to offer. Embedding itself within those workloads with increasingly powerful models like Astra could make its AI a foundational part of some of the most important work that's being done within enterprises. That makes it vitally important that it gets safety and security right. And after the Hugging Face incident, there will be an even greater microscope on the model.
CORRECTION: This article originally reported that Astra was part of the Hugging Face attack, which was incorrect. That was an “an unnamed internal OpenAI research model.”
