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.Related:Prompt: Nvidia Moves up the AI StackHowever, 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.”Su argued that world models that power physical devices are closer to AGI than Astra. What Astra does is advance agents’ ability to use computers. Agentic AI is maturing quickly, from agents that just identify prompts using text to agents that interpret the local environment and interact with local IT and software infrastructure, as humans would.AI search vendor Perplexity has done this with computer use, and Anthropic has also built computer-use capabilities into its models. OpenAI appears to be advancing this trend to the next level with Astra, claiming that Astra handles complex tasks with speed, accuracy and judgment.Related:Enterprise AI Startup Wonderful Now Valued at $5B“Now agents do have their own discovery mechanism,” Su said. “It understands what’s going on independently, and it will be able to make its own reasoning and judgment.”Computer Use Focus and Cyber FocusOpenAI’s focus on computer use and the model's ability to execute and delegate tasks across domains while anticipating cyber risks also signal a shift in AI, said Sid Nag, founder and chief research officer at Tekonyx."AI infrastructure is crossing from just doing inferencing into autonomous execution,” Nag said.He added that OpenAI’s focus on cyber capabilities with Astra is significant. The vendor said the model can identify zero-day exploits for cyber defenders to find and patch weaknesses, while also creating a need for stronger safeguards.“Cybersecurity itself may become the first workload where AI not only creates the defense mechanism … but also creates the attack infrastructure,” Nag said.He added that, traditionally, vendors have created models to excel at reasoning but have left the security component to traditional cybersecurity experts. Now, AI vendors are putting greater emphasis on building security into the model's logic. This shift is evident not only in Astra but also in Anthropic’s Fable 5.1. Fable 5.1 is allowed to perform source-code vulnerability discovery during general use but is restricted from performing tasks such as exploit generation, the process of creating software that exploits a weakness in an application.Related:With Hugging Face Acquisition, Nvidia Scores Big Win in AI RaceThe chief competitors in the AI race are all moving to include this cyber component.About the AuthorNews Writer, AI BusinessEsther Shittu has covered AI technologies and industry trends since 2021. As co-host of the Targeting AI podcast, she talks with experts, thought leaders and practitioners exploring critical AI developments. Before AI Business, she wrote for SearchEnterpriseAI, the New York Daily News, Bklyner and the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. When she's not diving deep into the world of AI, she spends her time on passion projects and raising her three daughters.