Responding to the next frontier of critical cyber capabilities

Cybersecurity is rapidly changing as models become more capable in ways that can both strengthen cyberdefenses and enable attacks at unprecedented speed and scale.

Our latest internal evaluations of Astra, one of our upcoming models, over the past few days indicate significant advancements in agentic coding and cybersecurity. These results, in addition to expert assessments, have led us to conclude last night that we cannot rule out critical cyber capabilities under our Preparedness Framework⁠(opens in a new window).

We are sharing this because we believe it’s important to be transparent with the public and the safety and security communities about this potential shift in capabilities.

We first published our Preparedness Framework in December 2023, well before models approached biological, chemical, cybersecurity, and AI self-improvement capabilities at this level. We created it to give us a guide for identifying progress in capability and then planning what our company would do as those capabilities emerge. Previous models, including GPT‑5.6‑Sol, have been evaluated for frontier cyber capabilities and assessed at the High (rather than Critical) threshold.

Measuring critical cybersecurity capabilities 

Under our Preparedness Framework, a model reaches the Critical cybersecurity threshold if it can identify and develop functional zero-day exploits of all severity levels in many hardened real-world critical systems without human intervention, or can devise and execute end-to-end novel strategies for cyberattacks against hardened targets given only a high level desired goal. 

While we continue to benchmark and assess this model, our preliminary evaluations indicate strong enough performance that we cannot rule out Critical capability level at this time. Astra is an upcoming model, and was not involved in exploiting Hugging Face.