// ZDNET — INTELLIGENZA ARTIFICIALE
OpenAI’s new Astra model is finally here – why safety experts are worried
The frontier model is now live for a select group. Here's what Astra can do, when to expect broader availability, and why it's setting off alarms.
OpenAI’s latest model, named Astra, is finally loose — sort of.
The company halted development on Astra, also known as GPT-6, after July’s now-infamous Hugging Face incident — in which an OpenAI agent hacked the developer site, and several others — as it reevaluated internal security standards. As of today, the model is live for a select group.
OpenAI emphasized that Astra sets a new standard for computer use, taking “about 47% less time per task than GPT-5.6 Sol, scoring 72.6% at roughly 40 minutes per task.” In addition to its engineering and browser use capabilities, the company mentioned the model’s cybersecurity prowess and ability to advance science, citing new discoveries in math and reasoning scores for biology.
According to OpenAI, Astra achieves what we’d expect from increasingly capable frontier models: better, more trustworthy automation of routine tasks like filling out forms, organizing calendars, conducting research, and analyzing data.
Also: How OpenAI’s agent escaped: Sprung by humans in a series of preventable events
Among other notable benchmark test scores, Astra scored 59.3% on Agent’s Last Exam, which measures agents’ ability to perform human-level professional work. That score beats Anthropic’s Fable 5 score of 48.7% and Claude Opus 5’s score of 52.7%. In a briefing for the model, OpenAI VP of research Aidan Clark added that Astra is the first model for which training was significantly supported by other models.
(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, ZDNET’s parent company, filed an April 2025 lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)
“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 […] about this model,” OpenAI president Greg Brockman said in the briefing, referring to artificial general intelligence (AGI). But when pressed to elaborate, he hedged without fully defining Astra as AGI, a term that still lacks an agreed-upon, industry-wide definition.
On Tuesday, OpenAI said in a post that the company had “strengthened and tested protections against cyber misuse” while Astra was paused — admitting that, in previous testing, the model had “discovered previously unknown vulnerabilities and turned them into working exploit chains.”