Company president Greg Brockman told media publications in a briefing that Astra’s launch could perhaps be viewed as the beginning of an era of artificial general intelligence.

OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra, the company’s newest AI model, is now available to a limited audience after its unveiling yesterday (3 September).

The company said it will become available “over the coming days … to all ChatGPT Plus, Pro, Business and Enterprise users, as well as through the OpenAI API, Microsoft Azure and AWS Bedrock”.

The company said “the most capable model we have ever broadly deployed” and “the world’s most intelligent and aligned model” also reaches the ‘critical’ level of cybersecurity capability under its preparedness framework.

Astra can, with the right tools and access, find previously unknown security flaws and develop new ways to exploit them across many well-protected systems without a person guiding each step, according to its maker, which said it therefore “significantly strengthened” protections against the new model taking harmful cyber actions through misuse or misalignment.

The company added that the new model is “better-aligned” for “respecting safety and security boundaries and staying within its authorised scope” but less monitorable in tested “adversarial settings” than its predecessor, GPT‑5.6 Sol.

Acknowledging the recent hack of Hugging Face by some of its other models during a testing scenario, OpenAI said it had built a new evaluation informed by that incident to evaluate “whether a model facing a difficult or impossible task will go beyond its intended scope”, and that “compared to GPT‑5.6 Sol, which without production safeguards went beyond the authorised target 48pc of the time, GPT‑6 Astra did this in 0pc of cases”.

The company said Astra is “state-of-the-art on computer use, browsing, software engineering, cybersecurity, science and professional work”, and that it can be used to “take care of tedious tasks”, conduct online research or analyse scientific data, and “autonomously install and test software, and troubleshoot problems”.

It is also described by its maker as “the best model for software engineering to date” and “a major advance for scientific discovery, mathematics and health”.

OpenAI president Greg Brockman told media publications in a briefing that Astra’s launch could perhaps be viewed as the beginning of an era of artificial general intelligence.

Alongside Astra, OpenAI yesterday also unveiled a new $1bn “global initiative to help frontline defenders use frontier AI cyber capabilities to protect essential services in the US and around the world”.

‘Daybreak for Frontline Defenders’ will aim “to help frontline defenders protect essential services” by bolstering and supporting their training in and deployment of AI, the company said.

Earlier this week, OpenAI’s direct rival Anthropic launched the latest iterations of Claude Fable and Claude Mythos, which it described as “the world’s most advanced models for coding and knowledge work”.

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