Source: OpenAI's Astra model uses “recurrent depth”, a technique that improves cost and performance but obscures the AI's reasoning, making it harder to monitor

OpenAI says its forthcoming AI model Astra marks a step up in capabilities such as coding and operating applications on a computer.

The Information 2026-09-02

Context & Ripple Effects

Astra’s development has paired capability claims with unusually explicit safety framing: OpenAI briefed US policymakers and regulators on the model family’s long-running-task abilities, then said an internal version produced results on problems in math, quantum complexity and theoretical computer science. The reported recurrent-depth design places the performance-and-cost claim alongside a less observable reasoning process.

That trade-off matters because OpenAI has already classified Astra as reaching its “Critical” cyber threshold, warned that safeguards can misidentify legitimate activity, and said advanced cyber capabilities will initially be limited to select partners. Critics including Ryan Greenblatt characterized the reported architecture as a threat to chain-of-thought monitorability; that is reaction, not an established technical finding.

First-order effects

OpenAI’s safety team must evaluate Astra’s cyber and computer-use behavior with less ability to inspect natural-language reasoning if recurrent depth shifts more of that process into model activations.
Select Astra partners receive access under a safety regime already designed for a Critical-threshold model, while OpenAI faces a sharper tension between cheaper, stronger task execution and evidence that safeguards can audit it.

Second-order effects

US policymakers and regulators, whom OpenAI had already briefed on Astra, gain a concrete reason to scrutinize whether deployment assurances rest on observable behavior rather than readable reasoning traces.
Model developers pursuing comparable cost and performance gains face a clearer design trade-off: architectures that reduce inference costs may require more investment in external evaluations and operational controls.

Third-order effects

If high-capability systems increasingly concentrate reasoning in opaque internal states, AI assurance will shift from inspecting chains of thought toward testing actions, access controls and post-deployment monitoring.
The resulting divide may favor providers able to pair efficient models with credible deployment controls, particularly for cyber-capable systems distributed first through restricted partner channels.

The trend: Frontier-model competition is increasingly turning on whether lower-cost, more capable architectures can be deployed with safety evidence that does not depend on readable reasoning traces.

Discussion

@ryangreenblatt Ryan Greenblatt on x
OpenAI's newest AI, Astra, is reported to use an ‘opaque reasoning’ architecture where more of the reasoning occurs in activations instead of natural language. This may be the single worst development for AI security/safety to date. The details of Astra aren't publicly known, but…
@sjgadler Steven Adler on x
If this is true, OpenAI seems to be violating one of the few redlines that exist in the AI industry. Absolutely do not train your models like this - what is going on??
@_nathancalvin Nathan Calvin on x
Really huge and extremely concerning story from the Information tonight. Looks like OpenAI utilized a breakthrough in neuralese for Astra that could destroy chain of thought monitorability - though the Informations source told them that OpenAI is currently
r/codex r on reddit
Breaking: OpenAI's new Astra model will reportedly think in neuralese
@scaling01 @scaling01 on x
just ~240 layers of effective depth what could possibly go wrong? this is genuinely the single worst thing that OpenAI ever did. it's like they committed a war crime. they opened Pandora's box. remember what happened when they announced strawberry and a new reasoning approach? ev…
@merettm Jakub Pachocki on x
I want to prevent a race into unmonitorability kicked off by confused reporting. The depth of the computation graph for our present frontier models, including Astra, is within a factor of two of GPT-4. OpenAI has worked to preserve and utilize chain-of-thought monitoring since ou…
@ryangreenblatt Ryan Greenblatt on x
> This may be the single worst development for AI security/safety to date. By this “development
@mkinniment Megan Kinniment on x
Broadly agree with Ryan's takes here. FWIW, seems like OpenAI has been experimenting with monitorability definitions that permit recurrence for a while. This is from March 2025:
@ryangreenblatt Ryan Greenblatt on x
It's possible OpenAI and others will use these architectures with only a few recurrent iterations (because that's most performant or due to safety concerns). If so, this would only make things moderately worse. But I expect much more opaque reasoning than this in the future...
@davidmanheim David Manheim on x
How are things going now? OpenAI:
@ryangreenblatt Ryan Greenblatt on x
Transparency about the opaque serial depth is great, but this statement is consistent with Astra having a configurable “dial
@andrewcurran_ Andrew Curran on x
So this is how they did it.
@eliebakouch Elie on x
a few thoughts on “recurrent depth” transformers the main question: why recurrent depth instead of just scaling depth? it's not faster at inference or training* since you still go through the full “effective depth
@imjustnewatai @imjustnewatai on x
looped transformers are real, public, and already here. the information says astra puts them inside openai's first critical-cyber model. a standard transformer sends each token through a fixed stack. recurrent depth reuses some blocks, feeding the hidden state through them again …
@micahcarroll Micah Carroll on x
A race to the bottom in monitorability due to a false belief that OpenAI is using neuralese models would be incredibly stupid
@industriaalist @industriaalist on x
this is such an unwinnable fight and i hope people are not naive enough to bank on labs agreeing to not make their models deeper (either with more layers or recurrence), esp when computational depth will become the bottleneck to scaling soon. for some context, sparsity and comput…
@balesni Mikita Balesni on x
switching to fully recurrent LLM architectures would be the biggest blow to safety, probably in history of AI all AI labs should commit to limit the opaque serial depth of their models, for the foreseeable future. this will not ensure monitorable CoTs but will protect us from the…
@daniel_mac8 Dan McAteer on x
Astra uses “recurrent depth” reasoning, a more powerful but less legible form of reasoning. Fable 5.1 explains:
@kimmonismus @kimmonismus on x
Holy, Astra is build different: OpenAI's Astra model reportedly uses “recurrent depth
@garrisonlovely Garrison Lovely on x
OpenAI: At long last, we have created The Neuralese Model from the classic OpenAI blogpost from 10 months ago, Don't Create The Neuralese Model.
@miles_brundage Miles Brundage on x
I'm not in the weeds enough to have a view on how much the 2x GPT-4 thing clarifies/reassures, but glad OAI quickly issued a statement. Would love to move towards continuous embedded auditing of things like this rather than reacting to incidents + leaks https://x.com/...
@zephyr_z9 @zephyr_z9 on x
So those looped transformer rumors that used to float every 6 months turned out to be true????
@tomekkorbak Tomek Korbak on x
i think the day when a frontier lab trains a frontier-scale recurrent (or otherwise unmonitorable) language model would be one of the darkest in the current AI era. this day is not today and i would love frontier labs to coordinate on a commitment that it never comes.
@aaronscher Aaron Scher on x
Big shame on OpenAI for seemingly breaking the norms they agreed to 10 months ago and doing one of the most dangerous AI methods we know of.
@amir Amir Efrati on x
Astra's chain of thought can be monitored, y'all. OpenAI said it today, as we wrote in our piece. This is about the future and what happens as new techniques proliferate and get supercharged.
@andrewginns Andrew Ginns on x
We can still monitor the CoT. Reporting on it being opaque is misinformed
@alextmallen Alex Mallen on x
Important clarification on the opaque(?) serial depth. Though I still have some important uncertainty about what specific architecture is being used.
@_nathancalvin Nathan Calvin on x
This may seem niche but it is a huge deal and genuinely scary. A remarkable list of top AI researchers, including at OpenAI, previously described monitorable chain of thought as “A New and Fragile Opportunity for AI safety.
@tenobrus @tenobrus on x
glad to see this post, and glad to see the situational awareness it represents from OAI. still quite concerned about the direction.
@teortaxestex @teortaxestex on x
Did OAI finally make the looped meme work?
@jessesingal Jesse Singal on x
we're begging to get our asses skynetted
@steph_palazzolo Stephanie Palazzolo on x
OpenAI's Astra AI uses a new reasoning approach called “recurrent depth.
@so8res Nate Soares on x
They sure are rushing to build the “it” from the New York Times Bestseller “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies”
@amir Amir Efrati on x
There seems to be a misunderstanding about the piece and what OpenAI is up to. There are new techniques at frontier labs that involve loop transformers and similar. As we say in the piece, OpenAI is putting limits on the loops and trying to make sure CoT is visible with Astra. Th…
@teortaxestex @teortaxestex on x
> The depth of the computation graph for our present frontier models, including Astra, is within a factor of two of GPT-4. so <240 layers? Makes sense, hardware punishes anything deeper, and training becomes harder too... But... been a while since we really Stacked More Layers.
@jachiam0 Joshua Achiam on x
In the interest of people understanding OpenAI's position, everyone should read this message from the Chief Scientist:
@peterwildeford Peter Wildeford on x
I hope to see OpenAI continue their commitment to monitorability!
@eliebakouch Elie on x
note that the latest big model by oai with architecture details was already very deep by today's standards, here is the number of layers for a few models Llama-3.1 405B: 126 GPT3: 96 Kimi K3: 93 Qwen 3.8 max: 92 GLM-5.3: 78 DeepSeek-V4-Pro: 61 gpt-oss 120b: 36 gpt-oss 20b: 24
@pigeon__s @pigeon__s on x
wait Astra is a latent space thinking model? i dont really buy that tbh but if thats true thats fucking awesome ive been wanting a big model to use this for years
@scaling01 @scaling01 on x
holy shit they did it Astra uses “recurrent depth” start the countdown for open models to use that too
@dimitrispapail Dimitris Papailiopoulos on x
LoOpEd TrANsfOrMeRs :D
@emostaque Emad on x
I see a lot of my TL freaking out about this Here is the reality: Frontier models will one shot just about anything at 10,000 tokens per second in a few years Do you really think we can monitor that? Would need speed limits on the model that it would code around anyway
@0xdoug Doug Colkitt on x
AI safety hysteria is where level headed reasoning goes to die. “Recurrent depth” is just a relatively minor architectural change, where the transformer spends more time on harder tokens. No, it's not going to replace chain of thought with “neuralese
@chrisgpt Chris on x
WAIT PLEASE TELL ME OPENAI PARALLELIZED RECURRENT DEPTH. Microsoft Research already showed us in June that you can run K latent blocks in parallel for R recurrent iterations. LoopCoder has also scaled recurrent depth to 40B parameters in July + a few others. But NOBODY has public…
@j_asminewang Jasmine Wang on x
we should avoid a race into unmonitorability & have a multilab commitment/standard to avoid neuralese
@robertskmiles Rob Miles on x
Can you believe these dipshits? Here's OpenAI's blog (being correct) less than a year ago:
@zeffmax Max Zeff on x
OpenAI's chief scientist responds to The Information's report that the company is using a looped transformer, an architecture that could degrade COT monitorability—one of the few windows into how AI models work. Broadly tho, he says CoT monitorability is fragile and
@alexiglad Alexi Gladstone on x
feed-forward transformers -> recurrent transformers -> energy-based transformers is the natural progression
@scaling01 @scaling01 on x
there goes CoT monitoring
@deanwball Dean W. Ball on x
this latest panic over the false claim that OpenAI is “doing neuralese
@tszzl Roon on x
i agree with this and think that CoT is at best an epiphenomenon of current training methods. it will break (in the future, not now). safety community too often centers thought terminating taboos like “neuralese” and “training on interp”
@jachiam0 Joshua Achiam on x
A very hot take: chain of thought interpretability was always going to be so fragile as to be an unacceptable backstop for long-term AI safety, and while I admire the optimism and effort involved in protecting its fidelity (and consider such effort to have been worthwhile), I do …
Kanean S A Kanean S A on linkedin
we previewed how we evaluated Astra (https://lnkd.in/g7xiBYap) — 2 things stand out to me: — 1. Astra is significantly more capable, and …
r/technology r on reddit
OpenAI Is About to Release Its First AI Model With ‘Critical’ Cyber Abilities | The company will give select partners early access to its Astra AI model …
@amir Amir Efrati on x
new: OpenAI & others quietly using loop transformers that don't show their ‘thinking’ when scaled up a leap forward on performance, but sparking concerns inside & outside OpenAI re: security as this takes off
@mobav0 Mo Bavarian on x
It's remarkable that The Information gets to mix 10% truth with 90% untruth and sell it to the public as “Information
@thlarsen Thomas Larsen on x
Very bad if true. I previously thought that in a short timelines world, the most likely case was that (1) the AIs would be misaligned, but (2) we would get a lot of evidence about it from reading the COTs. This evidence would increase the chance of a reasonable response from labs…
@mattyglesias Matthew Yglesias on x
More powerful but also more opaque, what could go wrong?
@austinc3301 Agus on x
This is extremely bad. I would have thought that the almost universal consensus of this being a terrible idea would dissuade OAI from it, but alas, you can never quite trust them with anything. This is horrible news for safety and for society as a whole.
@sama Sam Altman on x
Over the summer, we have been sprinting on safety priorities; it's more important than ever for capabilities and safeguards to advance together...There is an obvious tension here: on one hand, Astra is very good and we are excited to see what people will build with it. We are pr…
@yonashav Yo Shavit on x
Man, it seems really really important to have more information about this eval result, including potential contamination. I would be extremely nervous about that, or explicit or implicit metagaming-reasoning.
@openai @openai on x
As we prepare to release Astra, we're focused on making increasingly capable AI safe and broadly accessible. Astra represents a significant advance in cybersecurity capability, reaching the Critical threshold under our Preparedness Framework. We're previewing how we evaluated the…
@boazbaraktcs Boaz Barak on x
Astra is our first model that reaches “cyber critical” capabilities per our preparedness framework. As such, our safeguards, especially at first, may sometimes stop, pause , or ask for confirmation for legitimate work. https://openai.com/...
@mweinbach Max Weinbach on x
Astra is going to be an absurd cybersecurity model, it seems It scored 100% on ExploitBench https://openai.com/...
@elder_plinius @elder_plinius on x
Pliny the Liberator 🐉󠅫󠄼󠄿󠅆󠄵󠄐󠅀󠄼󠄹󠄾󠅉󠅭 @elder_plinius
@derrickcchoi Derrick Choi on x
At OpenAI, safety isn't just something we talk about. It shapes how the team builds and ships. We delayed parts of Astra's development to strengthen safeguards. Capability and responsibility have to advance together. Encourage everyone to give this a read
@shaunralston Shaun Ralston on x
Astra is significantly ‘safer’ than GPT-5.6 Sol, and exponentially more capable ~ smell the AGI 🚀
@andrewcurran_ Andrew Curran on x
Mr Altman using the caps key, serious business. He wouldn't say this unless it were true, because the release is probably only 36 hours away. All the rumors and leaks are the same; that it legitimately is a really big jump, and they are very proud of what they have made.
@therealadamg @therealadamg on x
https://openai.com/... Idk, but it looks like Astra is going to be one hell of a model....
@moyix Brendan Dolan-Gavitt on x
Apparently Astra can full chain
@theobearman Theo Bearman on x
Very interesting to me that Anthropic are saying this on the same day that OAI is claiming that Astra is their “most aligned model yet.” https://openai.com/...
@tjeparskis @tjeparskis on x
OpenAI woke up pretty quickly after Fable 5.1 dropped😅
@romainhuet Romain Huet on x
Astra is significantly more token efficient and more capable at finding vulnerabilities and developing exploits. We're planning to make it available soon, with access to its most advanced cyber capabilities limited at first, then expanding over time.
@aiwithsally Sally Stockholm on x
What stands out to me here isn't just that Astra is getting more capable. It's that OpenAI is explicitly talking about capability and safety progressing together. Reaching a “Critical” threshold under the Preparedness Framework means the conversation is no longer simply
@blueemi99 @blueemi99 on x
Astra is coming soon! OpenAI said the guardrails for it are ready to release according to their preparedness framework, which means its ready for release. Expect it in coming days/weeks.
@fouadmatin Fouad on x
Astra is both significantly more capable and more token efficient compared to 5.6 Sol, as seen in port of ExploitBench. We plan to make Astra available soon, with its most advanced cybersecurity capabilities initially more limited, then iteratively expand access more broadly.
@xiangyuqi_pton Xiangyu Qi on x
https://openai.com/... Astra achieves a full 100% success rate on ExploitBench, so we had to build an internal refresh using newly disclosed vulnerabilities from June through August that fall after the model's knowledge cutoff. On this refreshed benchmark, Astra remains dramatica…
@levie Aaron Levie on x
AI for cyber is about to go vertical. The models increasingly becoming insanely good at finding and exploiting vulnerabilities. Frontier models are ahead, but we're already seeing that open weights is not far behind. Most enterprises are already inundated with cyber discoveries, …
@chrisgpt Chris on x
Holy mother of God they cooked on Astra.. “We now believe Astra meets the Critical cybersecurity capability threshold under our Preparedness Framework” “We plan to make Astra available soon, but access to its most advanced cybersecurity capabilities will be more limited.”
@itszn13 @itszn13 on x
When testing Astra on ExploitBench we found that it was able to achieve 100% ACE on all 41 CVEs So we made a contamination free internal port using only V8 CVEs from the past 3 months. Astra still showed a major capability increase over 5.6 and did so with a lot fewer tokens!
@firstadopter Tae Kim on x
OpenAI: “We plan to make Astra available soon, but access to its most advanced cybersecurity capabilities will be more limited. Advanced cybersecurity work will initially be available to a group of testers, with access through Daybreak Blue following to expand defensive use.”
@infoxiao Xiao Ma on x
what a time to be alive
@jiaweiliu_ Jiawei Liu on x
astra as our first cyber critical model that 100%'ed public ExploitBench. we made a contamination-free, internal port based bugs after astra's knowledge cutoff, where astra is 4x more cyber capable than 5.6 at fewer tokens. yet, team cooked hard to make astra v aligned.
@synthwavedd Leo on x
OpenAI have today published a blog post detailing the precautions they're taking with regard to Astra's capabilities and the necessary safeguards Yet another good sign it's imminent! You can give it a read here - https://openai.com/...
@borismpower Boris Power on x
Astra! ♥️
@argofowl @argofowl on x
astra is coming tomorrow or thursday i'm beyond excited
@haider1 Haider on x
Astra is coming “soon”, but OpenAI still hasn't given an exact release date more interestingly, Astra scored a perfect 100% on ExploitBench, a benchmark testing whether models can build exploits for known vulnerabilities
@beffjezos @beffjezos on x
“Discordant” bro if Astra helped edit this tweet it has crazy big model smell
@andrewcurran_ Andrew Curran on x
GPT-Astra has been cleared for release, and OpenAI plans to release it soon. My guess would be Thursday. The version of Astra with unlocked cybercapabilities will only be available through OpenAI's Project Daybreak.
@zephyr_z9 @zephyr_z9 on x
The training data mix is playing a huge role in these jumps I wonder how they will productize the cybersecurity capabilities of their models Daybreak/Glasswing isn't enough
@kimmonismus @kimmonismus on x
All the problems seem to have been resolved. GPT-Astra is coming “soon.
@kimmonismus @kimmonismus on x
OpenAI's unreleased Astra model found two V8 zero-days during testing, and used them in an exploit chain with little human help. In their new blogpost, OpenAI wrote that in separate expert assessments, Astra compromised a hardened browser, escaped its sandbox and executed command…
@afinetheorem Kevin A. Bryan on x
Astra was “Critical” on cyber in internal work; seems they are going with a deployment strategy that looks like Anthropic, with broader availability at least initially only to defensive players. The correct order.
@angaisb_ Angel on x
OpenAI's Astra is its first model rated “Critical
@emilyforlini Emily Forlini on x
OpenAI confirms it's releasing its Astra model “soon,” but only select partners will get access to its advanced cybersecurity capabilities. It's a post-Hugging Face precaution. Astra has already proven capable of finding and exploiting vulnerabilities. https://fortune.com/...
r/singularity r on reddit
Sam Altman on X: “We are going to be launching our next model soon. There is an obvious tension... Astra is very good. We are proud of our work.”
r/OpenAI r on reddit
Fable 5.1 outperforms Fable 5, Opus 5, and GPT-5.6 Sol. Isn't time to reveal GPT-6 Astra?
r/technology r on reddit
OpenAI says upcoming model is so capable it requires stronger guardrails
r/accelerate r on reddit
OpenAI-Path to Astra: critical capabilities and frontier safeguards
r/BetterOffline r on reddit
OpenAI is doing it again: Our super scary new model with ‘Critical’ cyber abilities will only be available to select partners — it's just too powerful for the hoi polloi!
@jeremiecharris Jeremie Harris on x
I don't understand how you can look at the Hugging Face incident and go “we should make this happen again except next time lets allow the AI swarm bots to communicate in a secret language humans can't understand” It would make for less shocking METR post-mortems at least.
@dkokotajlo Daniel Kokotajlo on x
Holy shit fuck

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