OpenAI’s Astra Is Here: What to Know About GPT-6

OpenAI announced on Thursday that it is rolling out GPT-6-Astra, a new flagship model that president Greg Brockman called a 'generational leap in capability' and that outperforms its predecessor GPT-5.6 on computer-use tasks. The model was pretrained on more than 100,000 GPUs, making it OpenAI's largest training run, and will be available first to approved cybersecurity defenders in the Daybreak program, with broader rollout to ChatGPT subscribers and API users in the coming days.

The next flagship generation of ChatGPT https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/9-of-the-best-things-to-use-chatgpt-for/ 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 https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/openais-powerful-new-chatgpt-5-6-is-ready-for-you/ . 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 https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/what-is-agentic-ai-everything-to-know-about-artificial-intelligence-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 https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/openai-pauses-training-new-ai-models-cybersecurity-2026/ 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 https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/ai-agents-are-a-cybersecurity-nightmare-thats-only-just-begun/ . OpenAI said Astra has been extensively tested for cybersecurity-related vulnerabilities, and it will stagger 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 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.”