OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra Is Shockingly Good at Almost Everything

In brief

• OpenAI released GPT-6 Astra on September 3 at $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output, 2.5 times the price of the model it replaces.
• Testers with early access posted a street-by-street Manhattan in Unreal Engine, a browser-based 3D Hangzhou built in 24 minutes, a multiplayer shooter made in a day, and a Bach chorale with no voice-leading errors.
• The same testers rated its writing below its own predecessor, and Artificial Analysis measured a drop of roughly 80 Elo points on a benchmark of economically valuable professional work.

OpenAI released GPT-6 Astra on September 3, and within 48 hours the developers who got early access had turned the launch into a public stress test. What they posted splits along one clean line.

Astra is the strongest model anyone has used for anything spatial, mechanical, or agentic. It is also, by the account of several of the same people, a worse writer than the model it replaces.

The model costs $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output tokens, a token being roughly three-quarters of a word and the unit AI companies bill by. That is 2.5 times the rate of GPT-5.6 Sol, according to Artificial Analysis. OpenAI president Greg Brockman used the launch briefing to announce the arrival of AGI.