OpenAI reportedly ditches model over safety concerns

In Brief

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,...

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