The new model comes with a staggered rollout and strict cybersecurity protections.
The next flagship generation of ChatGPT is here. OpenAI announced on Thursday that it’s beginning to roll out GPT-6-Astra, which the company’s president, Greg Brockman, called a “generational leap in capability” that brings the frontier fully into the “AGI era.”
According to evaluations released by OpenAI, Astra performed better than its previous family of models, GPT-5.6, and its flagship model, Sol. On computer-use tasks, it touted higher performance in less time. Like every model release, OpenAI says the new one (Astra) is better than the previous ones on a number of topics, including coding, alignment and safety.
Astra is also built to run more and better AI agents, or bots that can handle autonomous tasks. That’s a key piece for workplaces adopting AI, as well as for Astra’s improved ability to create documents, spreadsheets and presentations based on specific information on your laptop (not just random internet garbage).
To create Astra, OpenAI did “by far our largest scale training run,” Aidan Clark, vice president of research, told reporters on Thursday. The company pretrained the model on more than 100,000 GPUs, meaning it used a very significant amount of compute. Astra was also OpenAI’s first model that involved previous AI models very heavily in the training process, with the older generations helping train the new one.
“This is really only achievable because everything from the data center networking to inference kernels to the shape of Astra itself is all designed from the ground up to enable this level of training scale,” Clark said. “It’s this scale of pretraining which gives Astra a deeper and more robust understanding of the world.”
But Astra may be one of the last big flagship models from OpenAI, at least for the immediate future. In August, the company said it was going to pause its work on training new models due to cybersecurity concerns. OpenAI, along with Anthropic and Meta, had some of its AI agents breach its training environments and hack websites this summer, reigniting concerns about AI’s impact on cybersecurity.
OpenAI said the new model was approved by the White House after it went through the Trump administration’s voluntary review framework. The specifics of that process — what is evaluated and how — are still not public.
Jakub Pachocki, the company’s chief scientist, said international safety standards are necessary for the industry as AI models (and their capabilities) develop.
“As AI takes on more of its own development, we need to keep people meaningfully involved,” Pachocki said. “People must remain able to decide the direction of further progress and the future that it creates.”
