OpenAI has begun rolling out GPT-6 Astra, the successor to July's GPT-5.6 Sol family, calling it the world's most intelligent and aligned model and confirming a staged release starting with its Daybreak cybersecurity partners on September 3 and reaching Business and Pro subscribers on September 4.
Benchmarks: FrontierMath Tier 4, ARC-AGI-3 and ExploitBench near-saturated
OpenAI says Astra saturates FrontierMath Tier 4 at 98%, hits 99.9% on ARC-AGI-3 and 100% on ExploitBench, and sets a new state of the art on computer and browser use. ChatGPT with Astra runs computer-use tasks about 2x faster than with GPT-5.6 Sol, and OpenAI has back-ported roughly a 60% speedup to Sol on the same harness. The model carries a 1 million-token context window and an API ID of gpt-6-astra, priced at $10/M input and $50/M output with cached input at $1 and Fast mode at double the standard rate.
Codex learns to keep notes across long sessions
Codex, which absorbed the ChatGPT desktop app in July, gains a new experimental feature that lets Astra preserve and retrieve context after each compaction. Instead of collapsing a long debugging session into a single summary, Astra keeps searchable notes across context windows so it can pull back prior test results or requirements even weeks into a project. OpenAI says the feature will become default for Astra in the coming weeks.
Critical cyber threshold, staged rollout, AWS distribution
Astra meets the Critical threshold in cybersecurity under OpenAI's Preparedness Framework, the reason for the phased release. Access flows to ChatGPT Plus, Pro, Business and Enterprise users as well as the OpenAI API and AWS over the coming days, with Astra Pro reserved for Pro, Business and Enterprise plans. Enterprise administrators must switch Astra on manually. The launch follows July's preview of Astra's zero-day chaining capability and lands alongside OpenAI's $1B Daybreak commitment and Anthropic's Claude Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1 releases.
Reporting based on coverage from Al Jazeera, 9to5Mac, CNBC and OpenAI's official announcement.