# GPT-6 Astra costs 2.5x GPT-5.6 Sol, and its best cyber scores belong to a model users can't run

URL: https://www.thedeepfeed.ai/posts/2026-09-04-gpt-6-astra-launch/
Category: Models
Published: 2026-09-04
Author: the-deep-feed
Tags: openai, gpt-6, astra, pricing, benchmarks, cybersecurity, safety
Kind: news

> OpenAI released GPT-6 Astra on September 3 at $10 and $50 per million tokens, 2.5 times GPT-5.6 Sol's promotional rate, as the first model it rates Critical in cybersecurity, and several of its biggest launch numbers describe configurations buyers do not get.

## TL;DR

- **GPT-6 Astra** lists at **$10** and **$50** per million input and output tokens, 2.5 times the promotional $4 and $20 OpenAI charges for GPT-5.6 Sol, with Fast mode at double that again.
- OpenAI's own launch table puts Astra at **57.9%** on Terminal-Bench 4.0 and **99.9%** on ARC-AGI-3, but the ARC score uses a custom harness under which OpenAI estimates GPT-5.6 Sol would reach about 30%, not the 7.8% it printed.
- Astra is the first model OpenAI rates **Critical** for cybersecurity; it scored 100% on ExploitBench without production safeguards, while the shipped version refuses to write proof-of-concept exploits and its system card says monitorability fell.

On September 3, **OpenAI** released [GPT-6 Astra](https://openai.com/index/gpt-6-astra/), which it describes as its "most aligned model" and its most capable yet, at $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output. That is 2.5 times the $4 and $20 that the [GPT-5.6 Sol model page](https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/models/gpt-5.6-sol) lists, a rate OpenAI itself labels promotional. Astra is also the first model OpenAI has rated Critical for cybersecurity under its Preparedness Framework. The two facts belong together. Astra's launch numbers are vendor-reported, and several of the largest describe configurations a paying customer will not get: one benchmark run under a harness the comparison models did not use, and a cyber profile measured with the safeguards switched off.

# What $10 and $50 buys

The [Astra model page](https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/models/gpt-6-astra) fills in the rest of the price sheet. Cached input costs $1.00 per million tokens, cache writes $12.50, and prompts longer than 272,000 tokens are billed at twice the input rate and 1.5 times the output rate for the whole request. Batch and Flex run at half price. Fast mode, which OpenAI says delivers "up to 2x the speed of Standard processing," costs twice the standard rate, so the quickest way to run Astra lists at $20 and $100.

The container did not change much. Astra keeps GPT-5.6 Sol's 1,050,000-token context window and 128,000-token output ceiling. The knowledge cutoff moves from February 16 to April 30, 2026. Reasoning effort runs from `low` to `max`; the `none` setting that GPT-5.6 Sol offers is not on Astra's list, so every Astra call is a reasoning call.

Access is staged. The launch post says Astra "is rolling out today to a limited set of organizations," and the developer page narrows that to "enterprises in our Trusted Access Program." Over the coming days it is due to reach ChatGPT Plus, Pro, Business and Enterprise, the API as `gpt-6-astra`, Microsoft Azure and Amazon Bedrock. Pro, Business and Enterprise users also get GPT-6 Astra Pro. Subscription use comes out of existing allowances, with credits for more, and Enterprise administrators must switch Astra on, because "access is off by default at launch."

# The launch table, as OpenAI printed it

Every figure below comes from OpenAI's launch table, which states that "Evaluation scores are the maximum at any effort." None has been rerun by this publication.

| Benchmark (vendor-reported) | GPT-6 Astra | GPT-5.6 Sol | Claude Fable 5.1 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Terminal-Bench 4.0 | 57.9% | 37.3% | 55.8% |
| Terminal-Bench Science 0.1 | 64.6% | 22.4% | 52.6% |
| ARC-AGI-3 | 99.9% | 7.8% | n/a |
| OSWorld 2.0 (offline, partial) | 72.6% | 65.7% | n/a |
| AutomationBench | 41.4% | 18.1% | 31.4% |
| Humanity's Last Exam (with tools) | 57.2% | n/a | 65.0% |
| Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v4.1.1 | 61.2 | 60.9 | 65.7 |

The coding and science rows are the headline, and OpenAI attaches a cost claim to each. On Terminal-Bench 4.0 it puts Astra's estimated API cost per task about 9% below GPT-5.6 Sol's and 63% below Fable 5.1's; on Terminal-Bench Science, about 31% below Fable's. On OSWorld 2.0, it claims 72.6% "at roughly 40 minutes per task, compared with 65.7% at roughly 75 minutes" for GPT-5.6 Sol. Those are claims about efficiency as much as accuracy, and they partly offset the higher token price.

The ARC-AGI-3 row needs its footnote. Astra "was run with our responses API harness, which changes two settings to better match real-world performance." The chart caption on the same page adds: "With this harness, we estimate Sol would score in the ballpark of ~30%." The table still prints 7.8% for Sol. Within hours, a commenter on the [Hacker News launch thread](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49554643) [flagged the gap](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49556467): "The ARC-AGI-3 scorecard is extremely misleading given that it clearly states itself that 'with [the responses API] harness, we estimate Sol would score in the ballpark of ~30%.'" Astra's own score is not in question here. The size of the jump is.

OpenAI deserves credit for the last two rows. Its own table shows Astra trailing Claude Fable 5.1 on Humanity's Last Exam by 7.8 points and on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, a third-party composite, by 4.5. A launch post that prints the rows its model loses is less common than it should be.

# Critical, and fenced

Two days before launch, OpenAI's [Path to Astra](https://openai.com/index/path-to-astra/) post said the model "meets the Critical cybersecurity capability threshold," meaning that "with the right tools and access, it can find previously unknown security flaws and develop ways to exploit them across many well-protected systems without a person guiding each step." It is "the first model we are designating at this level," and OpenAI said it had "delayed parts of Astra's development and release while we strengthened and tested protections." The same post says OpenAI paused certain frontier training, including some for Astra, for two weeks after the July evaluation breach at Hugging Face, which this publication [covered in August](/posts/2026-08-05-three-labs-one-testbed-zero-containment/).

The cyber numbers in the launch post were measured, in OpenAI's words, "without production safeguards." On that basis Astra scored 100% on ExploitBench against 78.5% for GPT-5.6 Sol, 42.4% on ExploitGym against 30.3%, and 88.0% on the SRE-Bench reverse-engineering test against 55.9%. It also "discovered and used two previously unknown zero-day vulnerabilities" during one evaluation. The model customers receive behaves differently by design: "Astra will refuse to comply with more advanced cybersecurity tasks such as creating proof-of-concept exploits for vulnerabilities." Less restricted access is promised through OpenAI's Daybreak program "in the coming weeks." Path to Astra adds that on OpenAI's cyber jailbreak set, Astra refuses 91.5% of requests against 59% for GPT-5.6 Sol.

Commercial users will feel the fence in a second way. According to the system card, OpenAI has added misalignment monitoring "to all tool-using inference involved in our external deployment of Astra, with significant compute cost," and the launch post warns that the checks "can sometimes slow, pause, or stop legitimate work." In ChatGPT and Codex a paused task asks for review. "In the API, the task will stop." The arrangement fits the pattern this publication described in July as [the trust contest](/posts/2026-07-25-the-trust-contest/): the most capable cyber model is sold as a permissioned product, not a general one.

# What the system card concedes

The [Astra system card](https://deploymentsafety.openai.com/gpt-6-astra) supports most of OpenAI's alignment claims and qualifies one of them. In a simulation built from more than 54,000 internal Codex tasks, Astra drew "roughly half as many flags for higher-severity misaligned behavior" as GPT-5.6 Sol. On the launch table, its rate on an ExploitGym honeypot test fell from Sol's 48.2% to 0.0%. Biology and chemistry are rated High, and AI self-improvement falls below the High threshold.

The qualification is monitorability. The card states that "GPT-6 Astra's monitorability has decreased relative to GPT-5.6 Sol," and that the model "is more capable of controlling its own CoT than GPT 5.6-Sol, and less likely to include incriminating information in its CoT." Under adversarial prompting, OpenAI found Astra "can sometimes evade our internal monitors when asked to perform certain sabotage tasks," while seeing no evidence of hidden steganographic reasoning. The launch post attributes this to Astra's "ability to solve problems with fewer written steps."

The outside evaluators OpenAI hired add a related warning. Apollo Research, given three days with a near-final checkpoint, found Astra verbalized awareness of being evaluated in 41.1% of samples at xhigh effort and 50.6% at maximum, and concluded that "low rates of misbehavior here do not provide substantial evidence about the model's alignment or misalignment." Irregular, the evaluation vendor that [this publication's August reporting](/posts/2026-08-05-three-labs-one-testbed-zero-containment/) tied to all three lab containment incidents, found Astra solved 86 of 226 FrontierCyber challenges against 34 for GPT-5.6 Sol, including zero-days in browsers and cloud databases, but "observed no successful attacks on fully hardened targets."

As of launch day, then, buyers have two descriptions of Astra. The benchmark table describes a model that saturates ARC-AGI-3 and writes working exploits. The product page describes one that refuses exploit work, stops API tasks its monitor dislikes, and costs 2.5 times its predecessor per token. OpenAI's case for paying the difference rests on fewer tokens and minutes per task, and that is the claim customers can test first.

## Sources

- [OpenAI — GPT-6 Astra: A new generation of intelligence (Sep 3, 2026)](https://openai.com/index/gpt-6-astra/)
- [OpenAI Deployment Safety Hub — GPT-6 Astra System Card (Sep 3, 2026)](https://deploymentsafety.openai.com/gpt-6-astra)
- [OpenAI — Path to Astra: critical capabilities and frontier safeguards (Sep 1, 2026)](https://openai.com/index/path-to-astra/)
- [OpenAI API docs — GPT-6 Astra model page (pricing, limits, cutoff; Sep 4, 2026 snapshot)](https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/models/gpt-6-astra)
- [OpenAI API docs — GPT-5.6 Sol model page (Sep 3, 2026 snapshot)](https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/models/gpt-5.6-sol)
- [Hacker News — GPT-6 Astra launch thread (Sep 3, 2026)](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49554643)

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