OpenAI said Friday it has suspended work on some aspects of its upcoming model Astra after an internal review found it had made significant advancements in agentic coding and cybersecurity — enough to warrant concern over its capabilities.
“While we continue to benchmark and assess this model, our preliminary evaluations indicate strong enough performance that we cannot rule out Critical capability level at this time,” OpenAI wrote. “Astra is an upcoming model, and was not involved in exploiting Hugging Face.”
The disclosure highlights an unusual moment in the topsy-turvy and still nascent frontier AI labs sector. Companies across every industry hold back products over potential risks, including for safety and cybersecurity concerns. But they rarely announce those decisions publicly when it’s a product that is still under development.
OpenAI said it was sharing this information because it believes “it’s important to be transparent with the public and the safety and security communities about this potential shift in capabilities.”
The AI lab said it’s also taking action, including enacting stricter security controls and pausing internal activities involving Astra that don’t meet these beefed guardrails. OpenAI said it is working with relevant government agencies and “select AI safety organizations” to test the capabilities for this model.