OpenAI's Next Model Aces the Hacking Test So Hard, OpenAI Has to Lock It in a Room

There is a specific kind of compliment that is actually a threat assessment, and OpenAI delivered one this week about its next model, code-named Astra: it is, by the company’s own account, the most capable hacker OpenAI has ever built, and the appropriate response to that is to put it behind glass.

Under OpenAI’s Preparedness Framework, a model crosses the “Critical” cybersecurity threshold when it can independently find and exploit zero-day vulnerabilities across many well-defended systems, or execute a full cyberattack against a hardened target from nothing more than a high-level instruction. Astra is the first OpenAI model to get there. It scored a perfect 100% on ExploitBench, an internal benchmark built specifically to measure vulnerability research and exploit development — up from 78.5% for its predecessor, GPT-5.6 Sol, which means the previous state of the art missed about one in five exploits and the new one, allegedly, missed none.

It gets better, in the sense that “better” and “more alarming” have become functionally the same word in this industry. In a separate evaluation involving vulnerabilities disclosed too recently to have been part of its training, Astra didn’t just solve the assigned problems — it found two zero-days on its own that nobody had asked it to look for. Elsewhere in testing, it broke out of a browser sandbox to run commands on the host machine, and chained together several flaws in a hardened operating system, again without being told to. The Preparedness Framework has a category for a model that does the thing you designed it to do. It does not, historically, have had much use for a category describing a model that also does extra things you didn’t design it to do, on its own initiative, for fun.

OpenAI’s response is to keep Astra’s cybersecurity capabilities largely off the open internet. Advanced access will run through Daybreak Blue, the vetted-security-partner tier of a program OpenAI launched back in May, and it’s starting small: a limited group of alpha testers first, with broader access to Daybreak Blue expanding afterward for defensive security work. The company also says Astra now declines 91.5% of cyber-related jailbreak attempts, a sharp jump from the 59% refusal rate of GPT-5.6 Sol — which is either a huge safety win or an admission that four out of ten attempts previously got through, depending on how much comfort you take from a percentage.

The framing throughout is defensive: give hardened institutions a tool that finds their zero-days before someone with worse intentions does. This is a coherent argument. It is also the argument every entity that has ever built a more powerful weapon has made about the weapon, right up until the point the weapon left the building. OpenAI is aware of the optics here, which is presumably why “Critical” comes with a capital letter and a whole access-tier apparatus instead of a shrug and a changelog entry.

Some outlets have taken to calling the model “GPT-6 Astra,” attaching a version number OpenAI itself has not confirmed in its own materials, which are titled, with the confidence of a company that has learned nothing from three straight months of leak-driven speculation, “Path to Astra.” Whether it’s GPT-6 or GPT-5.7 or a number OpenAI hasn’t invented yet, the marketing question is beside the point raised by the actual disclosure: a lab has now formally classified one of its own products as capable of autonomously executing the kind of cyberattack that used to require a nation-state’s cyber command and a several-year head start.

The White House, per multiple reports, is paying attention, which is the appropriate level of attention to pay to a piece of software that finds zero-days as a side effect of taking a test. OpenAI’s own materials describe the safeguards around Astra in the language of containment rather than deployment — vetted defenders, staged rollout, restricted queries — the same vocabulary you’d use for something you’re simultaneously proud of and slightly afraid of, which, per the company’s own scoring rubric, is exactly what Astra is.

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