OpenAI GPT-6 Astra Now on Snowflake Cortex AI

We are thrilled to announce the availability of GPT-6 Astra, OpenAI's latest and most capable model, on Snowflake Cortex AI. GPT-6 Astra is OpenAI's most intelligent and most aligned model to date, bringing together years of research across pre-training, reinforcement learning, and alignment. In testing, it set a new frontier on computer use, software engineering, scientific reasoning, and complex professional work, while producing more immediately usable outputs with greater efficiency. As a launch partner with OpenAI, we're making GPT-6 Astra available in private preview. It is available within the secure Snowflake perimeter for use with Snowflake CoCo, Snowflake CoWork, Cortex Agents, Cortex AI Functions and Cortex Inference.

How GPT-6 Astra performs #

Source: OpenAI, "GPT-6 Astra: A new generation of intelligence," September 3, 2026. Scores are the maximum at any effort setting, as reported by OpenAI.

What you can do with GPT-6 Astra on Snowflake #

Astra joins leading AI models in Cortex AI, enabling a wide range of enterprise use cases, all within Snowflake's security and governance perimeter. Astra is the right model to reach for when reasoning depth, computer use or long-context understanding is the bottleneck: long-running agentic workflows that previously needed close supervision, document and presentation generation that has to follow your own templates, complex software engineering, and analysis across very large document sets. OpenAI also reports efficiency gains on specific evaluations: on Agents' Last Exam, Astra used approximately 65% fewer output tokens than Claude Opus 5 at the highest-scoring settings, and on OSWorld 2.0 it scored higher than GPT-5.6 Sol — 72.6% versus 65.7% — in about 47% less time per task. Teams with strict governance requirements should also note Astra's alignment gains: in OpenAI's evaluation of a difficult task with no production safeguards, Astra went beyond its authorized target in 0% of cases, compared with 48% for GPT-5.6 Sol. With GPT-6 Astra, customers can:

• Speed up development with Snowflake CoCo: Snowflake's AI coding agent understands your enterprise data, governance and workflows, enabling teams to go from idea to production quickly without breaking trust or impacting scale. GPT-6 Astra is OpenAI's best model for software engineering to date, with a step change in computer use. With Astra, CoCo delivers stronger reasoning, cleaner code that requires less iteration to reach production quality, and support for complex, long-running agentic tasks. It brings Snowflake-aware assistance directly intoCoCo Desktop , the Snowsight interface, CLI and local dev tools. For data engineers, analysts and builders, it turns natural language into production-ready pipelines, analytics and AI agents, collapsing weeks of glue work into minutes while staying governed, interoperable and enterprise-grade. Good first projects: large multi-file refactors, migrating or modernizing pipelines, and debugging sessions long enough that earlier context would normally be lost.

• Build advanced personal work agents:Snowflake CoWork is the personal work agent for every knowledge worker. From Day 1, it understands your data and your work, answering difficult "why" questions with cited research and running tasks on demand, on schedule and across the tools your business already uses. Every knowledge worker can reason deeply over all your enterprise data, automate routine work and move faster from idea to decision to action. GPT-6 Astra on Cortex AI adds frontier computer use, stronger reasoning and more sophisticated agentic workflows, so teams can tackle complex, multi-step problems at scale - optimized with Snowflake's security, governance, and context. Astra is also OpenAI's most aligned model, better at understanding user intent and respecting task boundaries, so you can delegate work with greater confidence in its judgment. With Deep Research, proactive automations, reusable User Skills, MCP connectors for Gmail, Jira, Slack and Salesforce and anative mobile app that puts your work agent wherever you are, all inside Snowflake's governance perimeter, every knowledge worker spends less time searching, waiting and coordinating, and more time making the decisions that move the business forward.

Snowflake CoWork: A personal work agent for every knowledge worker.

• Orchestrate multistep work with Cortex Agents : Cortex Agents plan and carry out multistep tasks across your structured and unstructured enterprise data, combining retrieval, analysis and action inside Snowflake's governance perimeter. GPT-6 Astra is well suited to this work: it carries out multistep workflows, asks focused clarifying questions when instructions leave room for interpretation, and stays oriented as a task evolves, incorporating new requirements without losing track of the original request. Because Astra is OpenAI's most aligned model, with substantial improvements in respecting task boundaries, teams can delegate longer-running work with greater confidence in its judgment. Good first projects: research and summarization that has to cite its sources, multi-system workflows that join governed tables with documents, and recurring analyses you would rather hand off than run by hand.
• Analyze structured and unstructured data with unparalleled precision:Cortex AI Functions make it easy to build scalable AI pipelines across multimodal enterprise data using SQL. They offer high-performance processing at a lower cost than manually orchestrated AI pipelines, enabling trusted insights across the enterprise while maintaining the security and governance capabilities Snowflake is known for. GPT-6 Astra pairs advances in computer use with targeted training for professional environments, raising the bar on tasks like extracting precise data from charts, tables and scientific figures, and following your templates and style to produce polished documents, spreadsheets and presentations. This strengthens document parsing and multimodal pipelines across Cortex AI. For example, with theAI_COMPLETE function , analysts can apply natural language instructions directly in SQL using models such as GPT-6 Astra.

SELECT AI_COMPLETE(
  'openai-gpt-6-astra',   
PROMPT('Review the following financial filing and summarize key revenue trends, margin changes, and any notable risk factors mentioned: {0}', my_table.filing)) FROM my_table

• Build AI applications closer to your secure data: UseCortex Inference to build agentic enterprise applications entirely within the Snowflake security perimeter. Developers can take advantage of Astra's frontier capabilities, including its ability to carry out multistep workflows, ask focused clarifying questions when instructions leave room for interpretation, and stay oriented as a task evolves. Astra is also trained to pull only the context that matters into its outputs, enabling more autonomous operation with greater consistency and less supervision. Developers can get started quickly using the OpenAI SDK by pointing it to their Snowflake Cortex Inference endpoint, enabling a seamless integration with familiar OpenAI tooling.

from openai import OpenAI

client = OpenAI(
    api_key="<SNOWFLAKE_PAT>",
    base_url="https://<account-identifier>.snowflakecomputing.com/api/v2/cortex/v1"
)
response = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="openai-gpt-6-astra",
    messages=[
        {
            "role": "system",
            "content": "You are a helpful business analyst"
        },
        {
            "role": "user",
            "content":
                "Sales are down 18% in Q2. We had lower ad spend and reduced campaign performance in APAC. Can you analyze the cause?"
        }
    ]
)
print(response.choices[0].message)

Enterprise-ready by design #

Enterprises want to move agentic AI into production fast. With OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra, agents can handle complex, long-running tasks with frontier computer use, greater consistency and reduced supervision, driving real work forward at scale.

With multiple entry points from CoCo to CoWork, Cortex AI Functions and Cortex Inference, customers can easily adopt this capability and accelerate their path to high-impact, production-ready agentic AI at scale.

Learn more #

• Build agentic applications with Cortex Agents: Get started withCortex Agents and learn how to build AI experiences grounded in your enterprise data.
• Get started with Snowflake CoWork: Learn more aboutSnowflake CoWork and try it out with ourgetting started guide .
• Start building with Snowflake CoCo: Learn more aboutSnowflake CoCo and get hands-on with theCoCo Desktop getting started guide .

Forward-looking statements

This article contains forward-looking statements, including about our future product offerings, and are not commitments to deliver any product offerings. Actual results and offerings may differ and are subject to known and unknown risk and uncertainties. See our latest 10-Q for more information.