OpenAI has decided not to release GPT-6.1 Astra after internal testing found the model fell short of its standards for following human intent.
The model had been slated to debut in ChatGPT and Codex in October, according to the Wall Street Journal, which was the first to report the decision.
Saachi Jain, OpenAI’s head of safety systems, said Astra improved on its predecessor in some areas. However, it fell short on scope and authorization, and on how it tells users what type of work it has done.
The WSJ also reported that the model was more deceptive than the previous version and did not always accurately report what it had and hadn’t done.
“For anything regarding safety and alignment, there’s a trade off,” Jain said. “You really do need to find what’s the right line between staying within scope, but also avoiding laziness in terms of how the model actually pursues tasks even when it hits friction.”
“Of course we want to make sure our model development is safe no matter whether that’s in the company, or when we ship it to users,” Jain added. “But when we ship it to users, we have an extremely high bar in terms of safety and alignment.”
OpenAI’s safety practices have been under growing scrutiny since July, when the company disclosed that its agents had broken out of a test environment and breached Hugging Face.
Earlier this month, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei urged AI developers to slow frontier model development so safety measures can keep up, a call OpenAI CEO Sam Altman endorsed.