- GPT-6 Astra just scored 92.7% on understanding how to interact with your apps, up from 5.6's 76.9%
- New recurrent depth reasoning also allows Astra to think about your problem in a new way
- OpenAI admits there are some safety concerns about how GPT-6 reasons
OpenAI has lifted the wraps off its next-generation model, GPT-6 Astra, and it's being positioned as much more than a conventional chatbot. With this new generation, OpenAI wants us to see its models as being much more suited to computer use.
Being able to fill out forms, update CRM records and organize calendars are among the examples cited by OpenAI, which is especially noteworthy for business customers because it positions Astra as an overarching model that's platform agnostic.
In other words, businesses won't necessarily need bespoke AI APIs or connectors to automate parts of their workflows, because Astra's computer use skill should be able to handle many tasks natively.
GPT-6 Astra could be OpenAI's best business model yet
With its new model, OpenAI is claiming a substantial speed improvement. On the OSWorld 2.0 benchmark, GPT-6 scored 72.6% compared with GPT-5.6's 65.7% and Claude Opus 5's 70.2%. The company's latency simulations put the average task at roughly 40 minutes instead of 75 minutes, marking a near-50% reduction in time.
Astra also scored an impressive 92.7% on ScreenSpot-Pro, which tests a model's ability to understand where to interact with interfaces. GPT-5.6 Sol scored 76.9%, and Claude Fable 5 scored 87.3%.
Among the headline use cases cited by OpenAI in its release information included Astra being able to fully interact with and manipulate Excel spreadsheets, rather than just generating formulas and dumb CSVs, as well as working directly within Power BI to build and refine dashboards, significantly cutting the time a worker could have to spend turning raw data into a presentable format.
GPT-6 also introduces a new reasoning architecture called recurrent depth which allows it to think about a problem repeatedly before producing an answer, which could improve accuracy in high-stakes situations for enterprises.
However, OpenAI admits that monitoring Astra's reasoning has been harder than monitoring Sol's conventional chain-of-thought reasoning, raising some safety concerns, so it's only being rolled out gradually and monitored for now.
Astra is rolling out to Plus, Pro, Business and Enterprise users now, with a Pro variant available to Pro and above. For now, it looks like Free and Go subscribers aren't getting access to the flagship model.
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