OpenAI “cannot rule out” that its upcoming model Astra has “critical” cyber capabilities, a designation that has prompted the company to expand safety testing and pause internal activities that do not meet stricter security requirements, OpenAI told Axios.
OpenAI Astra Cyber Capabilities: What the Report Says
The company told Axios that internal evaluations of Astra left it unable to rule out “critical cyber capabilities” in the system, a designation sitting at the upper end of the risk tiers set out in OpenAI’s preparedness framework, first published in 2023 to govern how dangerous capabilities are assessed before deployment.
As a result, OpenAI has widened its security testing regime and halted internal work that does not meet tighter safeguard requirements.
The firm has also signalled it intends to slow Astra’s development until adequate protections are in place, a step that could push back any eventual public release.
It is to be noted that Astra was not connected to a recent set of exploits affecting Hugging Face, the machine learning platform, the company clarified.
Astra’s $2,000 Maths Breakthrough Explains the Stakes
The caution around Astra follows closely on the heels of a very different kind of announcement. On 1 August, OpenAI published a 249-page collection of results showing Astra had solved ten mathematics problems that had stood open for at least a decade, several for far longer, spanning group theory, high-dimensional geometry, coding theory, quantum complexity, lattice cryptography and extremal combinatorics.
OpenAI put the total API cost of producing the successful runs at roughly $2,000.
Unlike typical AI benchmark claims, every result was accompanied by a machine-checkable certificate formalised in Lean, a proof assistant that verifies each logical step and rejects any argument that does not follow.
The certificates were published openly on GitHub, meaning outside mathematicians could verify the work themselves rather than take OpenAI’s word for it. Thomas Bloom, who maintains the catalogue of open problems left behind by Paul Erdős, three of which featured among Astra’s results, called the release “big news”.
The achievement built on an earlier result in May, when the same model family reportedly disproved the 80-year-old Erdős unit distance conjecture, a proof that Fields Medalist Tim Gowers said he would have recommended for publication without hesitation.
OpenAI Astra Release Delay: A Rare Move Among AI Labs
A White House official told Axios that OpenAI had proactively briefed the administration, noting the company had “informed the administration of their plans to delay the release.”
The acknowledgement comes as the Trump administration works to formalise a review process for powerful AI models before public release, though questions including review length and access to underlying systems remain unresolved.
Anthropic Responsible Scaling Policy: How the Pledge Was Rolled Back
The episode revives scrutiny of a commitment Anthropic made previously, pledging to pause training of its most powerful models should their capabilities outstrip its ability to control them.
That pledge was scaled back in a February update to Anthropic’s Responsible Scaling Policy, which now argues unilateral pauses could backfire, warning that if one developer halted work while rivals kept shipping systems without comparable safeguards, the result could leave the wider AI landscape less safe rather than more.
Anthropic has since taken a more calibrated approach with its own high-capability systems, releasing a more heavily safeguarded version of its most cyber-capable model, Mythos, in June.
Dianne Penn, Anthropic’s head of product management, research and labs, told Axios the company had been “deliberately more conservative” with that release. Anthropic separately warned in a June blog post about models capable of improving themselves, coupling it with a call for a pause across the industry.
OpenAI Security Testing: Inside the Astra Slowdown
The disclosure follows remarks earlier in the week at the Black Hat cybersecurity conference, where OpenAI technical staff said the company was already easing testing while overhauling its security practices.
In a blog post published the same day, OpenAI said it had begun rolling out stricter controls, including isolated testing environments and monitoring systems tracking agentic behaviour across Astra’s applications.
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