Overview
- OpenAI launched GPT‑6 Astra on Thursday, Sept. 3, 2026, and has begun a phased release to ChatGPT Plus/Pro/Business/Enterprise users and to developers via the OpenAI API, Microsoft Azure and AWS Bedrock.
- Astra is built to perform end‑to‑end computer tasks such as navigating UIs, running tests, installing packages, producing finished documents and long coding sessions with a new Codex feature that preserves searchable notes across context windows.
- OpenAI says Astra reached a 'Critical' level for cybersecurity capability in its Preparedness Framework and warns that, when given tools and access, the model can discover and chain previously unknown vulnerabilities; the company has gated offensive exploit features under its Daybreak program.
- OpenAI’s internal tests found Astra’s written reasoning can be harder to monitor in adversarial evaluations, prompting developer guidance to limit agent permissions, run actions in isolated sandboxes, enforce approval at action boundaries, and record full agent trajectories.
- Vendor‑reported benchmarks show strong scores but are measured under specific conditions, community demos recreate 3D games and assets at lower quality, Astra does not accept native video or audio input, and OpenAI published API pricing at $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output tokens.