OpenAI launches GPT-6 Astra and says welcome to the “AGI era”
The New Stack Frederic Lardinois ● Covered by 4 sources
OpenAI launched GPT-6 Astra and called it the start of the AGI era. It’s a bold claim, but the bigger story is what it can already do — and how much it still costs.
Based on reporting by The New Stack, Frederic Lardinois — read the original for the full story.
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OpenAI has a new flagship model, and it’s not being shy about the pitch. On Thursday the company launched GPT-6 Astra, which it describes as “the world’s most intelligent and aligned model.” Greg Brockman went further at a press briefing, saying future people may look back on Astra as the point where AGI arrived.
He also made clear that OpenAI is no longer treating AGI as a contractual switch tied to Microsoft. Instead, he called it a “mission concept or spiritual concept.” That gives the company plenty of room to talk big, and Brockman did exactly that, closing with: “Welcome to the AGI era.”
The benchmarks are the part that make the hype harder to dismiss. OpenAI says Astra is its biggest training run yet, the first time it has pre-trained on more than 100,000 GPUs at its Stargate site in Texas. It also says earlier models helped supervise the training process, which is a notable shift in how these systems are built.
But Astra’s real value will be measured by what people pay for it and what it can do in messy real jobs. In the API, it will cost $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output tokens. OpenAI says the model can use fewer tokens on some evaluations and in partner tests, but the launch data is too thin to know whether that offsets the price. For now, the rollout starts with enterprise customers already using OpenAI’s Daybreak program, with broader access to follow in the coming days.
On capability, Astra looks strong in coding, science, and desktop tasks. OpenAI says it scored 74.1% on DeepSWE v1.1, 98.6% on ARC-AGI-3, 95.9% on BenchCAD’s Vision2Code subset, and 72.6% on OSWorld V2-Offline. It also cut average task time on that desktop benchmark from about 75 minutes to 40. At the same time, OpenAI says the model’s written reasoning is harder to monitor than Sol’s in tests designed to catch monitoring evasion, and that progress in intelligence does not automatically mean progress in alignment.
There’s a catch, as usual. OpenAI says Astra crossed its Critical cybersecurity threshold in internal testing, found two previously unknown vulnerabilities, and will be gated more tightly for defensive work. So yes, the company is talking like AGI has arrived. The shipping plan still looks a lot like the usual AI business: premium pricing, restricted access, and a long list of guardrails.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is OpenAI doing what OpenAI does best: turning a model launch into a philosophy seminar. The AGI talk is theater, but the tighter access, higher pricing, and safety gates are the real product strategy. The industry keeps selling “arrival” while quietly admitting these systems still need a lot of babysitting.
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