OpenAI releases GPT-6 Astra, its first 'Critical'-threshold model

OpenAI released GPT-6 Astra on September 3, 2026, built as a computer-use flagship rather than a chat model, scoring 72.6% on the OSWorld V2-Offline benchmark. It offers a 1.05 million-token context window priced at $10/$50 per million tokens and is the first OpenAI model to cross the company's 'Critical' cybersecurity capability threshold, which restricts who can access it and how.

Why it matters: Crossing OpenAI's own 'Critical' cyber threshold triggers extra access restrictions under its preparedness framework, the first real test of whether those safety commitments hold up once a model actually ships. The shift toward computer-use as the flagship use case, rather than chat, also mirrors recent moves by Anthropic and Google toward agentic/computer-use models, suggesting the frontier-lab race has moved past chatbots.