ChatGPT maker OpenAI said Thursday it would begin rolling out its newest and most powerful artificial intelligence (AI) model to select customers, saying it had built in safeguards to mitigate security risks.
"At this level of capability, safety has to become our top priority," OpenAI President Greg Brockman told reporters on a call about the release of GPT-6, also known as Astra.
Just over a year has passed since OpenAI launched the previous version of its flagship model, GPT-5, said AFP.
Concerns about the capabilities of advanced models have grown since then, following incidents involving systems built by OpenAI and rival developer Anthropic.
OpenAI paused some model development for two weeks this summer after two models it was testing were involved in a security breach at AI platform Hugging Face.
The San Francisco-based company said Astra was developed with stronger safeguards after that incident, though Astra itself was not involved in the hack.
Some cybersecurity customers will get access to the new model Thursday, the company said, with a wider rollout to other paying customers to follow. Users on the free tier or the cheapest paid plan will not get access.
"We are working towards getting Astra in everyone's hands as quickly as we can; I know it is frustrating and I appreciate the patience. It should be quick," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted on social media Thursday afternoon.
In a blog post, OpenAI said Astra can autonomously handle a wide range of "tedious" computer tasks, including website creation, scientific analysis, game development, cybersecurity and coding.
To illustrate the time savings of building autonomous AI agents with Astra, the company said the model could cut apartment hunting from six hours to under 10 minutes.
"It's not unreasonable to feel that we are now in the AGI era," Brockman said on the call, referring to artificial general intelligence, a hypothetical stage at which AI systems match human intelligence across most tasks.
OpenAI previously had an agreement with Microsoft, one of its earliest and largest investors, under which an exclusivity clause would end once OpenAI reached AGI. Those terms were scrapped in April.
- 'Limited window' -
OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki acknowledged there was still uncertainty about how a new model behaves once released.
"A model can become very good at achieving a goal, and it can still act in ways that go against what the person intended," Pachocki said on the same call.
"We also have to be willing to slow down or withhold further scaling when our confidence in safety is not sufficient," he added.
Altman explained in an interview with Bloomberg TV on Thursday afternoon why the company decided to release a new model with this level of uncertainty and risk.
"The world is very close to a complete change in the landscape of cyber attacks, and the only way that we see for society to collectively defend itself... is to use tools like Astra to rapidly defend against these new cyber threats," Altman said.
In July OpenAI confirmed that it had reached one billion active users across all of its products, including both free and paid users.
OpenAI, Anthropic and more than 100 other organizations signed an open letter last week calling for a coordinated global response to AI-related cybersecurity risks, warning that the window to strengthen cyber defenses was limited.
Anthropic went further on Monday, calling for industry-wide coordination on safety and on the pace of developing increasingly capable models.
"I believe that shared safety standards and international coordination on further AI development need to be prioritized now," OpenIA's Pachocki said on Thursday.
The US state of Alabama opened an investigation into OpenAI last week over the Hugging Face breach, his office citing what it called the company's complete lack of oversight and adequate safeguards.
It also comes as OpenAI and rival Anthropic are both racing towards becoming public companies over the next several months, though OpenAI might not hold its IPO till sometime in 2027, according to reports.
