OpenAI abandons plan to release upcoming model as safety concerns escalate

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman sits for a conversation with Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff at Salesforce's Dreamforce conference at the Moscone Center on Sept. 15, 2026 in San Francisco, California.

Benjamin Fanjoy | Getty Images

OpenAI decided not to release an upcoming artificial intelligence model, GPT-6.1 Astra, after determining that it did not adequately meet the company's safety standards, CNBC confirmed on Monday.

The announcement, which landed a day before OpenAI's annual developers conference, comes as the AI industry faces intensifying concerns surrounding the safety of advanced models. In an essay earlier this month, leadership at OpenAI's chief rival, Anthropic, urged AI companies to slow the pace of model development, a proposal that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman expressed support for.

"Of course we want to make sure our model development is safe no matter whether that's in the company, or when we ship it to users," Saachi Jain, head of safety systems at OpenAI, said in a statement. "But when we ship it to users, we have an extremely high bar in terms of safety and alignment."

The Wall Street Journal was first to report OpenAI's decision to scrap the release.

Earlier this month, OpenAI released GPT-6 Astra, which the company called the product of "years of research and big bets." Altman told CNBC at the time that Astra comes with a "new capability level" and would lead to "a boom of entrepreneurship, of creativity, of economic growth, of scientific discovery."

An OpenAI spokesperson said the company has other models coming soon.

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