OpenAI does a victory lap for its new AI model: ‘Welcome to the AGI era’

OpenAI does a victory lap for its new AI model: 'Welcome to the AGI era'

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Stephen Council

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OpenAI says that its new model has reached the AI industry's most sought-after milestone.

"Welcome to the AGI era," Greg Brockman, the company's president, said at the end of a press call announcing the arrival of OpenAI's Astra model on Thursday.

AGI stands for artificial general intelligence, a fuzzy concept that nonetheless has become a core goal for AI development. OpenAI defines it as "highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work." The company pitched Astra as a major research breakthrough and a shift in what's possible to delegate to AI. It's rolling out to customers this week.

Brockman has described reaching AGI as a gradual process. On the Thursday call, he said that in the future, he thinks people will look back and think AGI was created "about this time, and I think it might be about this model."

"For me personally, I do think we're there," he said.

GPT-6 Astra comes about a year after OpenAI launched its GPT-5 model family and about two months after its most recent upgrades, dubbed GPT-5.6. The company called Astra "the world's most intelligent and aligned model," and a "step change in professional work."

The model will also improve ChatGPT's "computer use" abilities, the company said. OpenAI employees told Business Insider last month that those tools — which run tasks autonomously on a user's desktop computer or internet browser — have reached an inflection point. The blog post said Astra can fill out forms, format documents, schedule appointments, and operate software.

Although successful "computer use" AI agents have been a long-standing goal of OpenAI and other tech giants, the technology is tricky because there's such a wide variety in people's desktop work, and so far, the tools have been fairly slow.

"Anything you can do on a computer, Astra can do for you. Fast," OpenAI wrote on X.

OpenAI previously said it delayed Astra's release until September after identifying improvements in its cybersecurity capabilities.

The company wrote earlier this week that it needed to ensure Astra's safeguards block its use by bad actors for hacking and that the model itself is aligned to do what's asked of it.

Like Brockman, other tech leaders have held up AGI as a goal. Google DeepMind cofounder Demis Hassabis said at the company's May conference that he expected AGI to arrive as soon as 2030, adding that humanity is standing "on the foothills of the singularity."

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, for his part, told the Sources podcast in a recent appearance that AGI is, at best, "a very poorly defined term. I was going to say it's like an irrelevant marketing term."

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Stephen Council

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Stephen is a senior tech reporter at Business Insider, covering OpenAI, Anthropic and the ecosystem around the leading artificial intelligence companies.Previously he covered technology at SFGATE, and has written for The Wall Street Journal, The Information and CNBC. He studied journalism and economics at Northwestern University.His work has earned an SF Press Club Investigative Reporting Award and, in 2025, SPJ NorCal’s Excellence in Journalism Award for Technology Reporting.Stephen lives in San Francisco. Contact him via email at [email protected], or on Signal, Telegram, or WhatsApp at 415-757-8198. Use a personal email address, a nonwork WiFi network, and a nonwork device; here's our guide to sharing information securely.