OpenAI Touts GPT-6 Astra as Its Safest Model, But It's Still Dangerous

OpenAI has launched its highly anticipated GPT-6 Astra model, focused on computer use and cybersecurity, with built-in safety features.

Astra highlights the trend of models becoming thinking engines capable of identifying security vulnerabilities, though they still carry risk.

OpenAI said Astra, introduced on Thursday, is its most aligned model, as it better understands user intent and model behavior than its predecessors. Users can delegate tasks while trusting the model’s judgment, and Astra can do tasks such as filling out online forms, updating customer records in a CRM and organizing the calendar, OpenAI said. It can conduct online research and draft email summaries. OpenAI said the model’s computer use capabilities are applicable across domains such as game development, electrical engineering and knowledge work.

The release comes after OpenAI temporarily slowed the model's deployment following an OpenAI agent's breach of Hugging Face and other platforms. In response, the AI lab said it built a new evaluation process informed by the Hugging Face incident and has strengthened its protections against the model taking harmful cyber actions.

However, with the right tools and access, Astra can be dangerous because it can find unknown security flaws and develop new ways to exploit them, OpenAI said.

“Based on the recent news, [safety] has been one of their biggest PR problems,” said Lian Jye Su, an analyst at Omdia, a division of Informa TechTarget. “Having that in place is quite significant.”

While OpenAI’s president and co-founder Greg Brockman has reportedly called Astra the start of artificial general intelligence -- the point at which AI can perform any intellectual task as well as a human -- that is probably not the case, Su said.

“To call it AGI is a bit far-fetched at this point,” Su said. “It has now become very fair to call it the best reasoning model, or it is now inching very close toward human-level reasoning.”