Critics warn OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra reasons opaquely, gutting CoT monitoring safety
GaryMarcus · x · 2026-09-04
Robert Wiblin and Gary Marcus amplify criticism that OpenAI is sacrificing the only meaningful safety assurance available today — chain-of-thought monitoring — to stay competitive, calling it "completely disastrous."
Quoted analysis from Ryan Greenblatt:
- GPT-6 Astra shows a massive jump in opaque reasoning: it reportedly solves hard competition math entirely "in its head" without verbalized reasoning, while prior models handled only basic word problems.
- Caveats: based on benchmark results with contamination concerns explicitly flagged.
- Monitorability: UK AISI found Astra is much harder to monitor.
- Cause: likely architectural changes with increased serial depth, though a normal pretraining scale-up is plausible.
If similar jumps continue across model generations, CoT monitoring may keep losing effectiveness as a safety tool.
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