Microsoft and OpenAI today announced that the frontier model GPT-6 Astra is now available in Copilot Cowork and Copilot Studio, as well as in Microsoft Foundry and GitHub Copilot. This gives users more model choice to which to delegate their work, and according to Microsoft’s announcement, GPT-6 Astra will enable users to delegate larger tasks, while the users can review the work and make decisions that can move work forward.
OpenAI also announced it is updating the Codex harness for faster computing speed. “Combined with Astra’s efficiency, this translates to a 1.9x faster task completion compared to the current GPT‑5.6 Sol experience, on the Mind2Web benchmark. The model’s improvements on speed mean it can take on many time-consuming life tasks for you, faster than you can.” OpenAI wrote in its announcement.
“The next era of enterprise AI will not be defined by chat experiences. It will be defined by how well a model can work for and with you,” Microsoft said in a statement. “We are investing to make it easier for customers to use advanced technology like Astra. AI initiatives often slow down on identity, networking, governance, data handling, evaluation, and compliance. Microsoft Foundry brings these fundamentals together in Azure, helping teams move from experimentation to production with speed and trust.”
For enterprise security, safety, and compliance capabilities, Microsoft Entra identity and access management provides encryption in transit and at rest, private networking options, role-based access controls, content filtering, safety evaluations, monitoring, and governance tools, OpenAI wrote in its announcement.
About Astra #
Astra is built for planning and decision support, purposeful output, and it can interact with software, move between apps and complete multi-step tasks that users can oversee and make decisions about moving forward or not. Scenarios that OpenAI is seeing include handling bugs from discover and reproduction to investigation, fix suggestions and prepare changing for developer testing and review, as well as providing business intelligence through PowerBI dashboards. It also can support workflows and do such work as produce documents, spreadsheets and presentations.
To learn more, read the Microsoft Foundry blog announcement and the OpenAI blog.