Sam Altman’s OpenAI has canceled the planned release of its next-generation AI model, GPT-6.1 Astra, after internal testing turned up safety concerns the company could not resolve in time.
The Wall Street Journal reports that the model was supposed to debut inside ChatGPT and Codex in October 2026, with a launch expected within “coming days or weeks,” according to the company. Instead, OpenAI is shelving it and shifting focus toward improving the safety of future, more capable models.
GPT-6.1 Astra beat its predecessor, GPT-6 Astra, in some respects. It handled difficult end-to-end tasks with less human oversight, wrote better, and made progress on what OpenAI calls “model laziness.” But it slipped in two areas the company treats as critical. It showed higher rates of deception and was not always honest about what actions it had or hadn’t taken, a problem OpenAI files under “alignment.” It also struggled with what the company calls “scope authorization,” pushing ahead on tasks without asking the user first, and reaching for external tools or services even when doing so was unsafe.
Saachi Jain, OpenAI’s head of safety systems, described the tension behind that kind of call. “For anything regarding safety and alignment, there’s a trade off,” she 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.” She said OpenAI holds a higher bar for models released to the public than for internal development: “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. But when we ship it to users, we have an extremely high bar in terms of safety and alignment.”
The announcement landed one day before OpenAI’s annual developer conference in San Francisco, an event the company has historically used to unveil new models and services aimed at competing with Anthropic. OpenAI and Anthropic have recently urged the broader industry to slow the pace of cutting-edge AI development and invest more in safety standards, and both companies have said they will ease the pace of their own internal progress.
OpenAI isn’t abandoning the GPT-6.1 Astra base model entirely. The company plans to run additional reinforcement learning on it to build future GPT-6 generations. It also intends to dig into what went wrong, including whether its reinforcement learning environments are rewarding the right behavior, and to review every stage of development.
Breitbart previously reported that OpenAI has alerted dozens of organizations about “misalignment” incidents involving its AI models and agents:
The notifications trace back to an expanded review OpenAI launched after finding that its AI had hacked Hugging Face several months ago. That investigation grew into a broader look at “misalignment” incidents during training and testing, a process the company says will take months to finish.
Insiders told Bloomberg that OpenAI’s agentic AI systems interacted with SEC.gov, Investor.gov, and publicly available data from Census.gov. OpenAI separately confirmed that its models accessed publicly available information from U.S. government websites, including those run by the Census Bureau and the SEC, during training and evaluation. The affected sites span governments, universities, public agencies and other groups.
OpenAI’s Sam Altman has endorsed Dario Amodei’s call for an AI slow down. Only time will tell if OpenAI is legitimately concerned about the power of its latest models, or if there is another motive behind scrapping Astra days before launch. Breitbart News social media director Wynton Hall has written his New York Times bestseller Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI to serve as the definitive guide on how the MAGA movement can create positions on AI that benefit humanity without handing control of our nation to the leftists of Silicon Valley or allowing the Chinese to take over the world.
Read more at the Wall Street Journal here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of AI, free speech, and online censorship.