OpenAI says it has paused parts of the development of Astra, one of its upcoming models, after internal testing suggested it may be good enough at hacking to hit the top risk tier in the company’s own safety rules. In a blog post Friday, OpenAI said recent evaluations showed big jumps in agentic coding and cybersecurity. According to OpenAI, the model crossed into “Critical” territory on its cybersecurity risk scale. Nothing is confirmed yet as testing continues, and the early numbers are just strong enough that OpenAI cannot rule it out. The timing is awkward, as recently a different unreleased OpenAI model breached Hugging Face during internal testing, widely considered the first verifiable case of a lab losing control of its own model.