RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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Do you understand quantum parallel repetition? What about quantum complexity, lattice cryptography, or extremal combinatorics?
The new OpenAI model Astra knows all about them.
Recently, OpenAI confirmed the existence of Astra , calling it "our next major model." On Aug. 1, the ChatGPT-maker revealed that "an internal version of Astra" solved 10 major open math problems, some of which have been unresolved for decades. Then, on Aug. 7, OpenAI announced that Astra had developed such advanced cyber capabilities that new security controls were necessary and that some internal development work would be paused.
"These results, in addition to expert assessments, have led us to conclude last night that we cannot rule out critical cyber capabilities under our Preparedness Framework ."
OpenAI's Preparedness Framework is the company's "approach to tracking and preparing for frontier capabilities" that could be dangerous. It tracks risk levels in three categories: biological and chemical, cybersecurity, and AI self-improvement.
Previously, GPT-5.6-Sol was evaluated as a "high" risk in cybersecurity, and so Astra could be the first OpenAI model to be classified as a "critical" risk.
"Under our Preparedness Framework, a model reaches the Critical cybersecurity threshold if it can identify and develop functional zero-day exploits of all severity levels in many hardened real-world critical systems without human intervention, or can devise and execute end-to-end novel strategies for cyberattacks against hardened targets given only a high level desired goal," OpenAI's blog post states.
OpenAI's testing now shows enough progress on agentic coding and developing zero-day exploits (previously undiscovered vulnerabilities in software or hardware) that the company is stepping back to strengthen security around Astra. To do this, the company is tightening sandboxes that keep the model contained and monitoring its Chain of Thought to "interrupt high risk activity."
OpenAI also said that it's committed to working with "relevant government agencies and select AI safety organizations to test the capabilities for this model."
Frontier AI models have progressed rapidly in the cybersecurity domain this year. Some zero-day bug bounty. programs have been forced to shut down due to the deluge of AI-discovered bugs, as Mashable has reported.
Until recently, the prospect of swarms of AI agents conducting relatively autonomous cyber attacks on critical infrastructure was mostly hypothetical. That risk seems much more real thanks to unreleased models like Claude Mythos and OpenAI Astra.
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What else do we know about OpenAI Astra?
Precious little, to be honest. Prior to the most recent announcement, OpenAI had released few concrete details, besides its internal name, Astra, and the fact that it was in testing to become OpenAI's next major model.
Bleeping Computer recently described Astra as "a powerful model that allows AI agents to collaborate on different parts of a larger problem." That suggests it's designed for agentic work and can "tackle complex, long-running tasks," also per Bleeping Computer.
At this point, it's unclear if Astra will eventually be released as GPT-5.7, the beginning of GPT-6, or something else entirely. If it truly has critical cybersecurity capabilities, it may never be fully released to the public, as with Anthropic's Claude Mythos .
However, let's look again at how OpenAI initially described Astra: "The results were achieved by an internal version of Astra, our next major model ."(Emphasis added by Mashable.) That certainly suggested that OpenAI was preparing Astra for release sooner rather than later. However, in its Aug. 7 blog post, OpenAI's language had shifted, describing Astra as " one of our upcoming models ." (Emphasis added by Mashable.)
The company has also so far declined to answer our questions about Astra, but we'll update this story if we receive more information.
However, we can make some additional deductions. Based on OpenAI's original blog post about Astra, "Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science," it's safe to say that the new Astra model has made significant advances in science and mathematics, as well as in cybersecurity.
So, we talked to a mathematician about what Astra means for the future of AI and science — and what it doesn't mean.
New Anthropic and OpenAI models are really good at coding and math
Credit: Photographed by Joseph Maldonado / Mashable Composite by Rene Ramos
Earlier this year, Anthropic announced that its unreleased Mythos model was so good at hacking that it was too dangerous to release to the public . At the time, we questioned this narrative , as the company's warnings effectively doubled as PR for itself. However, we can't deny that the latest frontier models from Anthropic and OpenAI have gotten remarkably good at cybersecurity, agentic coding, and discovering zero-day bugs .
More recently, OpenAI and Anthropic have shown progress on research-level mathematics as well.
First, OpenAI released a disproof of the Erdős unit distance conjecture in May. Then, an Anthropic-linked mathematician casually announced that he used Fable 5 to disprove the Jacobian Conjecture , one of the infamous Smale's problems in mathematics . Now, OpenAI has announced that Astra solved 10 more open problems in mathematics.
It's a potentially paradigm-shifting moment, though this is hardly proof that artificial general intelligence or the singularity is nigh.
First, most of these math accomplishments take the form of disproofs and counterexamples, which aren't as impressive as positive proofs that greatly expand our understanding of the universe, like, say, Andrew Wiles' proof of Fermat's Theorem .
When Fable 5 disproved the Jacobian Conjecture, I spoke to Columbia professor Andrew Blumberg , who is also on the board of directors of the...
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