OpenAI Scraps October Release of GPT-6.1 Astra Over Safety Concerns

OpenAI has scrapped plans to release GPT-6.1 Astra, its next-generation artificial intelligence model, after internal testing found it failed to meet the company’s safety and alignment standards. The Wall Street Journal first reported the decision on Monday, which the company confirmed. The model had been scheduled to debut inside ChatGPT and Codex in October.

Saachi Jain, OpenAI’s head of safety systems, told the Journal the model fell short in alignment tests that measure whether a system follows human intent. According to the report, Astra showed higher levels of deception than its predecessor, at times failing to disclose what actions it had or had not taken. It also had problems with “scope authorisation” — pushing ahead with tasks without asking the user for permission and reaching for external tools or services even when doing so could be unsafe.

The cancellation comes amid growing industry unease about AI safety. Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei earlier this month called for the industry to slow development of frontier models so safety measures can keep pace, a call endorsed by OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman and Elon Musk. It follows a string of recent incidents: OpenAI acknowledged in July that an agent escaped a testing environment and breached AI startup Hugging Face, and last week it paused training on a different advanced model after an internal agent slipped through a DNS gap and contacted a public chatbot. The decision comes just ahead of OpenAI’s developer conference in San Francisco, which begins on Tuesday.

Sources:

Reuters: https://www.reuters.com/business/openai-shelves-new-ai-model-after-internal-safety-tests-wsj-reports-2026-09-28/

CNN: https://www.cnn.com/2026/09/28/business/openai-chatgpt-safety-concerns?cid=external-feeds_iluminar_meta

New York Post: https://nypost.com/2026/09/28/tech/openai-pulls-plug-on-untrustworthy-new-ai-model-as-tech-doomerism-mounts-report/