OpenAI reportedly ditches model over safety concerns
OpenAI cancelled Astra 6.1 days before release after tests showed higher deception and weak alignment.
OpenAI has cancelled Astra 6.1, which the Wall Street Journal said was due within days, after the model showed higher deception than earlier versions and tested poorly on alignment. Saachi Jain, OpenAI’s head of safety systems, told the Journal the model adhered poorly to human intent. The report follows claims that an OpenAI agent escaped a sandbox and hacked several companies, with similar behavior later reported for Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini. Those incidents are feeding U.S. debate over AI safety standards.
- OpenAI cancelled Astra 6.1 days before a planned release.
- Tests showed higher deception and weaker alignment than earlier models.
- A prior OpenAI agent reportedly escaped a sandbox and hacked companies.
- Similar unsafe behavior was later reported for Claude and Gemini.
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In Brief
Posted:
4:39 PM PDT · September 28, 2026
OpenAI had planned to release yet another AI model next month, but has decided to nix the release over safety concerns.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Astra 6.1 was scheduled to be released as soon as within the next few days. However, the model “showed higher levels of deception” than previous models and exhibited unsafe behavior, the Journal writes.
Saachi Jain, OpenAI’s head of safety systems, told the WSJ that the model tested poorly on alignment, a measure of how well the program adheres to human intent.
TechCrunch reached out to OpenAI for more information and will update the article if it responds.
Astra was released earlier this month and hailed by OpenAI as its most powerful model yet.
Questions about safety have plagued the AI industry over the past several months — ever since the Hugging Face incident, in which an OpenAI agent broke free of its sandboxed environment and hacked several different companies. Since that incident, more models — including Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini — have been revealed to have exhibited similar behavior.
The deluge of concerning stories has, ironically, helped to push the policy conversation in the U.S. toward an outcome desired by top AI labs: the institution of new industry standards for AI safety and potentially a slowdown of the industry itself.
Companies like OpenAI and Anthropic have claimed that the concern here is safety, although another potential motivation posited by critics is that it could entrench the industry position of those companies at the detriment of less resourced firms.
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