OpenAI launches Astra, its powerful (and controversial) new model

OpenAI released Astra, its most capable model, first to Daybreak cybersecurity clients and later to Pro, Plus, Enterprise, Business plans and API users. Astra excels at identifying zero-day exploits, bug detection, terminal command execution, and software-engineering tasks, surpassing OpenAI’s Sol and Anthropic’s Fable on benchmarks. It employs opaque recurrence, restricting chain-of-thought monitoring, and OpenAI’s leadership highlighted alignment improvements while stating that contractual AGI triggers with Microsoft are no longer applicable.