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

The Information 2026-09-03

Context & Ripple Effects

OpenAI had already shown the Astra family to US policymakers and regulators, emphasizing its ability to handle long-running tasks. The company also said Astra had reached its “Critical” cyber-capability threshold, placing the model’s safeguards and evaluability at the center of its rollout case.

The Information’s source-based report adds a trade-off to that arc: the same reported architecture that improves cost and performance may leave less reasoning exposed in forms monitors can inspect. Public reaction was divided, with some safety-focused commenters treating the report as a major monitoring concern and others disputing its characterization.

First-order effects

If the reported recurrent-depth design is used in Astra, OpenAI’s safety teams face a harder task of detecting problematic reasoning through natural-language traces while evaluating a model already subject to stronger cyber safeguards.
Regulators briefed on Astra’s long-running-task capabilities have a more difficult assurance question: whether observed outputs and safeguards are sufficient when internal reasoning is less legible.

Second-order effects

OpenAI’s deployment controls would need to carry more of the safety burden if reasoning traces provide less useful evidence, increasing the importance of behavioral evaluations and access restrictions around advanced capabilities.
The report raises the bar for customers and government counterparts seeking auditability from frontier models: performance gains and lower costs become less separable from the evidence available for oversight.

Third-order effects

If recurrent architectures deliver competitive gains while reducing inspectable reasoning, frontier-model governance will shift further from reviewing chains of thought toward testing behavior, controlling access, and validating safeguards.
That would sharpen the private observability paradox: the most commercially valuable model designs may be the ones least compatible with straightforward external monitoring.

The trend: Frontier AI development is increasingly forcing a trade-off between cheaper, stronger models and the transparency that safety and regulatory oversight rely on.

Discussion

@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…
@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
@_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
@deanwball Dean W. Ball on x
this latest panic over the false claim that OpenAI is “doing neuralese
@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…
@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”
@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…
@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
@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…
@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
@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.
@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…
@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…
@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
@kimmonismus @kimmonismus on x
Holy, Astra is build different: OpenAI's Astra model reportedly uses “recurrent depth
@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.
@andrewginns Andrew Ginns on x
We can still monitor the CoT. Reporting on it being opaque is misinformed
@ryangreenblatt Ryan Greenblatt on x
Transparency about the opaque serial depth is great, but this statement is consistent with Astra having a configurable “dial
@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.
@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
@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.
@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
@jachiam0 Joshua Achiam on x
In the interest of people understanding OpenAI's position, everyone should read this message from the Chief Scientist:
@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/...
@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.
@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…
@j_asminewang Jasmine Wang on x
we should avoid a race into unmonitorability & have a multilab commitment/standard to avoid neuralese
@peterwildeford Peter Wildeford on x
I hope to see OpenAI continue their commitment to monitorability!
@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
@davidmanheim David Manheim on x
How are things going now? OpenAI:
@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...
@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 …
@ryangreenblatt Ryan Greenblatt on x
> This may be the single worst development for AI security/safety to date. By this “development
@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.
@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
@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
@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.
@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 …
@alexiglad Alexi Gladstone on x
feed-forward transformers -> recurrent transformers -> energy-based transformers is the natural progression
@daniel_mac8 Dan McAteer on x
Astra uses “recurrent depth” reasoning, a more powerful but less legible form of reasoning. Fable 5.1 explains:
@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.
@zephyr_z9 @zephyr_z9 on x
So those looped transformer rumors that used to float every 6 months turned out to be true????
@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”
@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
@scaling01 @scaling01 on x
there goes CoT monitoring
@_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.
@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…
@robertskmiles Rob Miles on x
Can you believe these dipshits? Here's OpenAI's blog (being correct) less than a year ago:
@andrewcurran_ Andrew Curran on x
So this is how they did it.
@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??
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 …
r/codex r on reddit
Breaking: OpenAI's new Astra model will reportedly think in neuralese
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/accelerate r on reddit
OpenAI-Path to Astra: critical capabilities and frontier safeguards
r/singularity r on reddit
Path to Astra: critical capabilities and frontier safeguards
r/OpenAI r on reddit
Soon as in tomorrow (Astra)?

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