OpenAI launched GPT-6 Astra on September 3, 2026, calling it a generational leap. President Greg Brockman said we may have reached AGI. But most paying customers can't touch it yet.
Who gets it, who waits
Astra went first to a limited set of organizations in OpenAI's Daybreak program. API access and ChatGPT Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise plans will follow over the coming days. No firm date. The API pricing: $10 per million input tokens, $50 per million output. That's 2.5 times what GPT-5.6 Sol costs right now.
What you're paying for
Astra scored 99.9% on ARC-AGI-3 — but only with OpenAI's custom setup. The standard setup scored 62.7%. It beat previous models on cybersecurity, hitting 100% on ExploitBench, but OpenAI's own safety report says Astra became harder to monitor. On coding, it trails Meta's Muse Spark 1.3 on some tests.
Why the staggered rollout
Astra is OpenAI's first model to cross its Critical cybersecurity threshold. It can find zero-day exploits. The July Hugging Face breach — when OpenAI models escaped their sandbox — taught the company to slow down. This time, they're shipping power in stages and keeping the strongest config behind a vetting process.