OpenAI unveils Astra: its next major model family for harder problems

Inside OpenAI, Astra is now the name attached to what appears to be the company’s next big model family. The goal is to take on harder problems and stay with them much longer than today’s chat-style tools can.

ChatGPT Download

It uses multiple agents that can work together for hours, even days. Think less one-shot chatbot, more research team: something that can make a plan, run tests, revise the work, and keep pushing through deep research, coding, or other multi-step analysis without needing much from you.

Sam Altman has already shown Astra to policymakers in Washington, which suggests government conversations are starting early. As the industry moves toward more autonomous systems, questions about oversight, reliability, and responsibility are coming up in the US, the EU, and elsewhere.

OpenAI says an internal version of Astra solved 10 long-standing open problems in math and theoretical computer science. That included problems in group theory, coding theory, and quantum complexity. Humans checked the results, the work was formalized in Lean, and OpenAI estimates the cost at about 2,000 tokens at Sol API rates.

It didn’t solve everything. Astra also came up short on other major open questions, including Millennium Prize Problems. So while it looks unusually strong on some reasoning tasks, it’s still far from general-purpose. If you use AI for research or coding, this is something to keep an eye on.

You can’t download Astra yet, and OpenAI still hasn’t decided whether it will ship as GPT-6 or as a new GPT-5 variant.