OpenAI will not release its newest artificial intelligence model, known as Astra 6.1, after internal testing revealed it did not meet safety standards, the company confirmed on Monday.
The news comes one day before the AI giant hosts its annual developer conference known as OpenAI DevDay in San Francisco, where the company is expected to make several announcements, though it is unclear if a new version of Astra will be among them.
Astra 6.1 was an improvement over previous models in some aspects, but “it didn’t quite meet the bar in terms of staying within scope and authorisation, and how it communicates back to the user about the type of work it’s done,” Saachi Jain, OpenAI’s head of safety systems, said in a statement.
“We want to make sure our model development is safe no matter whether that’s in the company, or when we ship it to users. But when we ship it to users, we have an extremely high bar in terms of safety and alignment,” Jain added.
*AI safety fears*
Concerns about AI safety have escalated in recent months after models developed by OpenAI and rival lab Anthropic were involved in security incidents during testing.
Agents built with OpenAI’s models have inappropriately accessed websites maintained by US federal agencies, an Australian government health statistics portal and Hugging Face, a repository of AI models.
OpenAI apologised Monday for not responding properly to the Australia incident, in which its AI models accessed government websites without authorisation.
“We are sorry and working to do better in the future,” OpenAI said in a blog post, adding that the company would explain “what we know, what we have changed, and what we will do to rebuild trust with the Australian people.”
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