The company announced on August 7, 2026, that its upcoming model, Astra, may soon reach a “critical” level of cybersecurity capability, a designation that has never been triggered before under the company’s Preparedness Framework. AdvertisementWhat “critical” actually meansOpenAI’s Preparedness Framework is the internal rubric the company uses to assess how dangerous its models might be across several risk categories. The “critical” tier sits at the top of that scale, and until now, no OpenAI model had come close enough to warrant activating it. At the critical level, a model would theoretically be capable of autonomously identifying and exploiting severe zero-day vulnerabilities without human intervention. The company has paused certain internal development activities related to Astra that don’t meet newly tightened security requirements.