Sam Altman
Entrepreneur and investor who has served as CEO of OpenAI since 2019, leading the company behind ChatGPT and its research on artificial general intelligence.
“The world is very close to a complete change in the landscape of cyber attacks. And the only way that we see for society to collectively defend itself against this coming wave of models from around the world and from other companies is to use tools like Astra to rapidly defend against these new kind of cyber threats.”
Bloomberg Tech · September 2026
Context
Altman was explaining why Astra is going first to trusted access partners, with tiered cyber access and a broader rollout to follow. He answers the obvious objection: if the model has a cyber problem, why let anyone use it for cyber work?
Transcript
…The models could do more damage if we don't do a good job at that. And so we have spent, you know, obviously this model took us a little longer to release than we were hoping. I think it'll be worth the wait, but we really wanted to spend the time on the safety and security alignment of this model.
Yes.
And I think as people understand the power and impact and capabilities, they will be happy that we did. We will have different tiers of cyber access for this model, for cyber in particular. Today we're rolling it out to trusted access partners and then in the coming days, assuming everything goes well, we'll roll it out more broadly. You could say, well, you know, if this model has a cyber problem, why let anyone use it for cyber? And I think it's very important to note that the world is very close to a complete change in the landscape of cyber attacks. And the only way that we see for society to collectively defend itself against this coming wave of models from around the world and from other companies is to use tools like Astra to rapidly defend against these new kind of cyber threats. So we will have multiple programs for people at sort of different levels of verification and trust, but we do think it's quite important that the world use these models to collectively defend ourselves.
What happened prior to release is important, right? You determined that Astra can find and develop zero-day exploits without any human intervention, essentially. And so you paused some of the work to strengthen the safeguards. What specifically was it that you saw that made you hit pause, the…
So it's worth pointing out that the model that we're launching today is GPT-6 Astra has been done training for a while. The model that we recently... Talked about pausing as a future model. But with Astra, we did hit cyber critical, and that required under our preparedness framework a new set of…
I got a lot of questions for you, Sam Altman Astra and chain of thought. I don't know if that comes as a surprise to you or not, but as Astra becomes more autonomous or future generations of the model become more autonomous, can OpenAI sort of say with confidence that you see and understand what…
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