# Why Astra's opacity problem could force a pause > Source: > Published: 2026-09-06 22:40:32+00:00 ast week, OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra made something clear: The future of AI is anything *but* clear. In the company's announcement of its most powerful model yet, it noted that Astra’s written reasoning is harder to monitor than GPT-5.6 Sol’s when tested explicitly on its ability to evade monitoring. The company attributed this to the model simply being smarter: It could solve problems in fewer steps and didn't need to write down every thought process on simpler tasks in order to think them through. In a briefing with the press last week, Jakub Pachocki, chief scientist at OpenAI, said that the company is working on ways to strengthen visibility and make the models "more verbose in their chain of thought." However, Pachocki said that lack of monitorability is "largely just a general consequence of increasing intelligence and a consequence of scaling." "These more capable models can perform harder tasks using fewer language tokens or no language tokens, so we also see a big improvement in capability there, which also reduces our ability to monitor those easier tasks," said Pachocki. In the same briefing, OpenAI CEO Greg Brockman said that the capabilities of Astra mark a significant moment in the company's quest towards achieving artificial general intelligence, and that it's not unreasonable to think we are now in "the AGI era." "When we started OpenAI, we kind of thought that there was going to be this well-defined moment that everyone would recognize AGI," said Brockman. "It hasn't played out like that. It's a much more gray, fuzzy thing. But I think that 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 I think it might be about this model." But having a more advanced model also heightens safety concerns. In an interview with The Deep View after the announcement, Pachocki reiterated, "We do see some tendency to kind of think less when it's told that it's being monitored, which is also a worrying trend." Extrapolating on that point, [Arjun Jaggi](https://arjunjaggi.com/), applied AI researcher, told The Deep View, "This isn't a theoretical risk. Earlier this year, when OpenAI's agents went rogue and attacked Hugging Face, investigators only understood what happened because they had chain-of-thought logs to read. That's how the tampering was caught. Take that visibility away and the next incident like it gets much harder to diagnose, possibly impossible to catch while it's happening." ## Our Deeper *View* OpenAI, Anthropic, and others have long talked about controllability, observability, and preparedness. However, the two rivals are also locked in a perpetual quest to one-up each other, creating powerful AI that can claim the crown of being state-of-the-art. But if we are already losing our ability to understand these models' inner thoughts, what's in store for us when they have 10x the capabilities that they do now? An inability to monitor the models risks being the first step towards an inability to control them. "I don't think anyone is prepared for a continued increase in machine intelligence at the current pace," Pachocki told The Deep View. "I think it's something we need to treat with extreme urgency, and we need to find ways to slow down AI development, to introduce safety gates, [and] to coordinate between labs but also between nations… [For] the preparedness framework, I think we have to evolve that to really also be about development, because currently it's very focused on deployment. In the future, I would like to involve third-party organizations more deeply into our development process." In June, the [Anthropic Institute suggested](https://www.thedeepview.com/articles/anthropic-s-rsi-warning-contrasts-with-ipo-filing) that the "option to slow or temporarily pause frontier AI development" could give governments and AI labs time to align their processes around safety. With OpenAI signaling its willingness to pause, the ball is in Anthropic's court to make the next move. But if they do, then what about Meta, SpaceXAI, and the Chinese labs?