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The next flagship generation of ChatGPT is here. OpenAI announced on Thursday that it is beginning to roll out GPT-6-Astra, which 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. The company pre-trained 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 told reporters on Thursday. “It’s this scale of pre-training 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 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 Astra has been extensively tested for cybersecurity-related vulnerabilities, and it will be staggering its rollout. GPT-6-Astra will be available to approved cybersecurity defenders in OpenAI’s Daybreak program starting on Thursday, with plans to bring the new model to paying ChatGPT subscribers and its API over the next several days.
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 shared 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.”
Katelyn Chedraoui
Reporter 2
Katelyn is a reporter with CNET covering artificial intelligence, including chatbots, image and video generators. Her work explores how new AI technology is infiltrating our lives, shaping the content we consume on social media and affecting the people behind the screens. She graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a degree in media and journalism. You can reach her at [email protected]. See full bio
