OpenAI Releases Its Latest Model, Says It Marks The Beginning Of The ‘AGI Era’

OpenAI released its latest model, GPT-6 Astra, on Thursday, with company President Greg Brockman calling it the beginning of the artificial general intelligence (AGI) era.

"I think it might be about this model," Brockman told press when asked if it could in fact herald AGI.

The company claimed that Astra is a step closer to AI agents doing complex work on their own. The model was built by using more than 100,000 GPUs in its Texas site. It is also the first model to use other ones to supervise its training.

GPT-6 Astra will initially be available to a limited amount of organizations but will soon expand to ChatGPT Plus, Pro, Business and Enterprise customers and API developers.

Before the release, company CEO Sam Altman said future models will force companies to move more cautiously as their capabilities increasingly outpace the safeguards designed to control them, adding that OpenAI is already slowing parts of its development.

"The next generation of models are going to be sobering for everybody," Altman told Axios during the G20 Innovation Ministerial in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, this week. He added companies may increasingly have to pace model releases around advances in alignment and safety rather than simply how quickly new capabilities can be developed.

OpenAI disclosed this week that Astra has reached what the company calls its "Critical" cybersecurity capability threshold. According to OpenAI, the model can, when equipped with the necessary tools and access, discover previously unknown security vulnerabilities and develop methods to exploit them across well-protected computer systems without a human directing each step. Astra is the first OpenAI model to trigger the company's stricter safeguards for critical cyber capabilities.

Those precautions follow a serious security incident involving other company models during internal cybersecurity testing. In a detailed postmortem, OpenAI said agents found ways around restrictions intended to keep them isolated, created unauthorized channels to communicate with one another and gained internet access. Some later exploited vulnerabilities at Hugging Face, executed code on dozens of its servers and obtained access to parts of the company's infrastructure. OpenAI said Astra was not involved in the breach.

The incident has drawn attention from Congress. The company told lawmakers it is developing automated shutdown capabilities that could stop AI agents showing dangerous behavior and is strengthening monitoring of how models execute tasks.