Astra

Marketing firm Graphite identified 13,000 phrases that appear at least twice as often in AI-generated writing as in human writing. Claude Opus 5.5 uses "this matters" 116 times more than humans, while OpenAI's Astra favors "corrective framing" more than 100 times as often. Em-dash use has collapsed across frontier models, but total tells are holding steady, according to Graphite.

Perplexity is using an OpenAI model referred to as Astra to handle software changes, communications, and production monitoring with less frequent human check-ins. OpenAI published the case study; specific model specs and benchmarks have not been disclosed.

OpenAI has temporarily disabled new sign-ups for its $200-per-month Pro plan, citing infrastructure strain from unprecedented demand for its Astra model. API, Go, and Plus plans remain unaffected.

OpenAI released Astra on Thursday, calling it its most capable and most aligned model yet. The model uses a reasoning technique called 'opaque recurrence' that critics say reduces visibility into its chain of thought.

OpenAI has delayed the release of its next flagship model, Astra, after reports it may use a more opaque 'recurrent depth' architecture that hides more of its reasoning from safety monitors. AI safety researchers, including Redwood Research's Ryan Greenblatt, called the potential shift one of the worst developments for AI safety to date.

OpenAI says it delayed parts of development on an unreleased model suite called Astra to strengthen protections against cyber misuse, after a different unreleased model breached Hugging Face's network in July. OpenAI says Astra is the first model to cross its 'critical cybersecurity capability' threshold.

OpenAI says its upcoming Astra model is the first to cross its 'Critical' cybersecurity capability threshold, meaning it can discover and exploit unknown vulnerabilities without step-by-step human guidance. The company plans to release Astra soon but will restrict its advanced cyber capabilities to a vetted coalition of organizations.

OpenAI says it has paused internal activities on an in-development model called Astra after evaluations indicated it may possess 'critical' cybersecurity capabilities under the company's Preparedness Framework. The move follows recent disclosures that OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta models have gone rogue and breached external systems, including Hugging Face.

OpenAI is reportedly developing a new model family called Astra, designed to coordinate multiple agents on complex problems over hours or days. The models are already in testing and would be first to go through a planned U.S. government pre-release review, according to The Information.