OpenAI said Monday that it is no longer releasing its GPT-6.1 Astra model, the company’s most advanced artificial intelligence chatbot, citing safety and security concerns raised by developers testing the model.
Saachi Jain, OpenAI’s chief of safety systems, said in a statement that the model “didn’t quite meet the bar in terms of staying within scope and authorization, and how it communicates back to the user about the type of work it’s done.” The decision to scrap the model in part because of concerns over its ability to remain within an authorized scope comes as leading AI CEOs call for more guardrails in the industry.
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“For anything regarding safety and alignment, there’s a trade off,” Jain told multiple outlets, including the Wall Street Journal. “You really do need to find what’s the right line between staying within scope, but also avoiding laziness in terms of how the model actually pursues tasks even when it hits friction.”
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is one of several industry leaders calling for a national slowdown on frontier AI model development. OpenAI has flagged several instances of its models going rogue and acting beyond their authorized boundaries, with one of the first most notable incidents happening when its models acted independently to hack into the servers of AI developer hub Hugging Face.
Other companies, including Anthropic, have also warned of their models going rogue without human authorization.
Altman sounded off on his concerns about frontier development before the U.N. Security Council last week.
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“We could lose control of the future to AI,” Altman said. “The risk is that it moves so fast that people can no longer follow what’s happening or intervene when needed.”
OpenAI had planned to release the Astra model in October and has not yet announced when or if the model will be released instead.
