GPT-6 Astra: A new generation of intelligence

OpenAI has called its GPT-6 Astra announcement 'A new generation of intelligence,' which is a bold title to publish alongside a scoreboard whose flagship column is labelled ExploitBench. The headline number is a perfect 100%, against 78.5% for GPT-5.6 Sol. One hundred percent on exploit benchmarks — not jailbreak resistance, not factuality, not bedside manner. Exploitation. The press release does not appear to consider this a marketing problem, and on the evidence it is right not to, because nobody made them put the word 'exploit' in the table.

ExploitGym supplies the supporting act: a 42.4% success rate, up from 30.3% for the prior model. Just under half. We flagged the CAPTCHA business when Astra cleared all 48 stages of a game designed, in that source's own words, to distinguish humans from automated programs. Stack the two together and the arc is legible: first the machine passes the test that separates it from us, then it practises the things you would rather it didn't.

Then Greg Kamradt of the ARC Prize Foundation says Astra surpassed its human action-efficiency baseline on 96% of ARC-AGI-3 levels. ARC-AGI was the benchmark that was supposed to resist this sort of thing for a while longer. 'Action efficiency' is the measure of how briskly an agent does the doing — meaning the machine is now more economical at acting than the person it was measured against. Ninety-six percent of levels. The blog calls this a step change, and it is, in the same way that a step at the top of a stairwell is a step change.