“The world is very close to a complete change in the landscape of cyberattacks,” Sam Altman told Bloomberg Television earlier this month, and the only defense he offered was more of the same thing. The only way “for society to collectively defend itself against this coming wave of models,” the OpenAI chief executive said, “from around the world and from other companies, is to use tools like Astra to rapidly defend against these new kind of cyber threats.”
Astra is OpenAI's newest frontier model, released as GPT-6 Astra the same week. It is also, by the company's own account, the first model it has built that crossed its internal ceiling for offensive cyber capability. Asked about that directly, Altman did not hedge. “With Astra, we did hit cyber critical,” he said. “And there that required, under our preparedness framework, a new set of safeguards just to be able to release Astra, um, because of those cyber capabilities you talked about.” OpenAI's own framework says this model is dangerous enough on the cyber axis to require safeguards that no previous release needed, according to Altman.
