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OpenAI announced Thursday that it will begin rolling out its newest and most powerful artificial intelligence (AI) model to select customers, stating it had built in safeguards to reduce security risks.
"At this level of capability, safety has to become our top priority," OpenAI President Greg Brockman told reporters on a call about the release of GPT-6, also known as Astra.
Just over a year has passed since OpenAI launched the previous version of its flagship model, GPT-5. Concerns about the capabilities of advanced models have grown since then, following incidents involving systems built by OpenAI and rival developer Anthropic.
OpenAI paused some model development for two weeks this summer after two models it was testing were involved in a security breach at AI platform Hugging Face.
The company said Astra was developed with stronger safeguards after that incident, though Astra itself was not involved in the hack.
Some cybersecurity customers will get access to the new model Thursday, with a wider rollout to other paying customers to follow. Users on the free tier or the cheapest paid plan will not get access.
"We are working towards getting Astra in everyone's hands as quickly as we can; I know it is frustrating, and I appreciate the patience. It should be quick," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted on social media Thursday afternoon.
In a blog post, OpenAI said Astra can autonomously handle a wide range of "tedious" computer tasks, including website creation, scientific analysis, game development, cybersecurity and coding.
To illustrate the time savings, the company said the model could cut apartment hunting from six hours to under 10 minutes.
"It's not unreasonable to feel that we are now in the AGI era," Brockman said, referring to artificial general intelligence (AGI), a hypothetical stage at which AI systems match human intelligence across most tasks.
OpenAI previously had an agreement with Microsoft under which an exclusivity clause would end once OpenAI reached AGI; those terms were scrapped in April.
OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki acknowledged there was still uncertainty about how a new model behaves once released.
"A model can become very good at achieving a goal, and it can still act in ways that go against what the person intended," he said, adding that the company must be willing to "slow down or withhold further scaling when our confidence in safety is not sufficient."
Altman told Bloomberg TV the company decided to release the model despite this uncertainty because "the world is very close to a complete change in the landscape of cyber attacks," and tools like Astra are needed to help society defend against emerging threats.
In July, OpenAI confirmed it had reached one billion active users across its products. Last week, OpenAI, Anthropic and more than one hundred other organizations signed an open letter calling for coordinated global action on AI-related cybersecurity risks. Anthropic went further Monday, calling for industry-wide coordination on safety and the pace of AI development.
Alabama opened an investigation into OpenAI last week over the Hugging Face breach, citing what it called a lack of oversight and safeguards.
The developments come as OpenAI and Anthropic both move toward becoming public companies, though OpenAI's IPO may not occur until 2027, according to reports.
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