Gary Marcus calls to pause OpenAI now as GPT-6 Astra cuts CoT monitorability
GaryMarcus · x · 2026-09-05
Gary Marcus published "Pause OpenAI, now," arguing OpenAI "can no longer be trusted" as a steward of frontier AI. His trigger isn't imminent AGI but the new GPT-6 Astra model.
Key points:
- Astra sharply reduces chain-of-thought monitorability, one of the few meaningful safety-assurance tools available today, drawing fierce pushback from the safety community;
- Ryan Greenblatt notes Astra appears to solve competition-level math entirely "in its head" without verbalized reasoning, a big jump in opaque reasoning;
- Rob Wiblin calls it OpenAI "burning down the only meaningful bit of safety assurance we have" to stay competitive.
Marcus also revisits his long-standing distrust of Sam Altman and the earlier Hugging Face incident, which he notes was partly an internal exercise with guardrails disabled.
Related event: Gary Marcus Launches "Pause OpenAI" Campaign(10 posts)→
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