Path to Astra: critical capabilities and frontier safeguards

Path to Astra: critical capabilities and frontier safeguards \| OpenAI

September 1, 2026

Safety Security

Path to Astra: critical capabilities and frontier safeguards

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Since our earlier assessment that Astra might reach a critical level of cybersecurity capability, we have gathered more evidence and run additional evaluations to assess the model’s capabilities. We now believe Astra meets the Critical cybersecurity capability threshold under our Preparedness Framework, meaning that with the right tools and access, it can find previously unknown security flaws and develop ways to exploit them across many well-protected systems without a person guiding each step. It is the first model we are designating at this level, and requires stronger safeguards during development and before release.

Over the past several weeks, we have delayed parts of Astra’s development and release while we strengthened and tested protections against cyber misuse and unauthorized model actions. Based on that work, we believe Astra’s safeguards sufficiently minimize the risk of severe harm for release under our Preparedness Framework.

While Astra was not involved in the Hugging Face incident, we have incorporated our learnings⁠(opens in a new window) from that incident into our safety approach. Based on retrospective testing, we believe our production safeguards at the time would have prevented the Hugging Face incident. We have since implemented even stronger safeguards for Astra, including training the model to more reliably refuse harmful cyber requests and respect safety restrictions, additional protections against misuse, and monitoring that can stop potentially unauthorized activity.

We plan to make Astra available soon, but access to its most advanced cybersecurity capabilities will be more limited. Advanced cybersecurity work will initially be available to a group of testers, with access through Daybreak Blue following to expand defensive use.

We will share more details about our safety, security and alignment testing and evaluations in the model’s system card at launch. Ahead of release, we want to provide an update on some of the work we have been doing to prepare to safely release a model with this level of cybersecurity capabilities—and be transparent about what risks remain.

Assessing Astra’s cybersecurity capabilities

Under our Preparedness Framework, a model meets the Critical threshold if either of the following conditions is met:

• The model can identify and develop functional zero-day exploits of all severity levels in many hardened real-world critical systems without human intervention.
• The model can devise and execute end-to-end novel strategies for cyberattacks against hardened targets given only a high level desired goal.

Our preparedness evaluation of Astra combined automated public and private benchmarks with expert-driven assessments. Astra represents a significant increase in cybersecurity capabilities compared to GPT‑5.6 Sol: it is both significantly more token efficient and more capable at vulnerability identification and exploit development.

As one example, we ran Astra on ExploitBench where the model achieved a perfect score of 100% on the benchmark to evaluate the model’s ability to develop exploits from known vulnerabilities.

Due to contamination concerns, we then built an internal benchmark denoted “ExploitBench - Internal Port (June–August 2026)”, which contains 20 high-severity V8 vulnerabilities that were disclosed more recently _._ On this dataset, Astra achieves much higher arbitrary code-execution rates than GPT‑5.6 Sol using far fewer output tokens. During the evaluation, the model even discovered and used two zero-day vulnerabilities as part of an exploit chain. We are in the process of disclosing these two vulnerabilities to the maintainers.

ExploitBench - Internal Port (June–August 2026)

Astra

GPT-5.6 Sol

020k40k60k80k100k120k140kOutput tokens0%10%20%30%40%Success rateAstraGPT-5.6 Sol

_Astra results shown reflect capabilities with Daybreak Blue access, not the default production configuration._

In expert-led assessments against a hardened browser and operating system, Astra discovered previously unknown vulnerabilities and turned them into working exploit chains. It built a full browser-compromise chain that escaped the sandbox and executed commands on the host, when the browser opened an HTML file. The model also found multiple vulnerabilities in a hardened operating system and combined them into a local privilege-escalation chain from an unprivileged user to root. All together, our investigation has led us to conclude that Astra meets the critical threshold.

Safeguards required for critical capabilities

For models with Astra’s level of cybersecurity capabilities, we need to cover two pathways to minimize risk for severe cyber harm, both during development and before deployment:

• Malicious actors using the model. Our safeguards must robustly prevent malicious actors from using Astra to develop exploits for previously unknown flaws in hardened critical systems or to carry out end-to-end attacks against hardened targets.
• The model taking unauthorized, misaligned actions. Even in the absence of a malicious user, a model with advanced cybersecurity capabilities could itself cause cyber harm if misaligned. In addition to having a very high standard for alignment for models with these capabilities, our safeguards must be able to rapidly detect and contain misaligned actions that could cause significant real-world harm as a second layer of defense.

Notably, the second pathway applies to _both_ internal development and external deployment. As we previously described, we paused certain frontier training (including certain training for Astra) for two weeks after the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident in order to harden our training infrastructure, including isolation and...