OpenAI said on August 7, 2026 that internal evaluations of Astra, one of its upcoming models, show such strong agentic coding and cybersecurity performance that the company can no longer rule out the Critical cybersecurity capability level defined in its own Preparedness Framework. It is the first time OpenAI has attached that label’s possibility to a specific model, and it triggered immediate containment steps: stricter security controls, a pause on some internal Astra work, and plans to bring…