OpenAI Rated Its Next Model a 'Critical' Hacking Risk, Restarted the Training It Paused, and Is Shipping It Anyway
About This Episode
OpenAI said on September 1 that Astra is the first model to meet its Critical cybersecurity threshold, capable of finding and exploiting unknown flaws across well-protected systems without step-by-step human direction. It restarted its paused frontier training run on August 28 and will release Astra soon, with advanced cyber access limited to a small alpha group that includes the US government. The same week Anthropic disclosed it had also paused training and evaluations after its own incidents, and both labs now call for a coordinated, verifiable pacing mechanism nobody has built.
Our Take
In August OpenAI paused itself and the open question was who holds the brake; this week both labs released it, OpenAI rated the result critically dangerous and is shipping it behind a velvet rope, and both now say out loud that the brake should belong to someone else, who does not exist.