GPT-6 Astra CAPTCHA hype meets reality: agent passes only 2/7 real signup flows, burns $19.68
JanJanJaJa · reddit · 2026-09-09
After Sharif Shameem's viral clip showed GPT-6 Astra clearing all 48 levels of Neal Agarwal's 'I'm Not a Robot' game, a blogger stress-tested the model against real self-registration on 7 US sites:
- Only 2/7 passed (GitHub, Etsy) — and neither had a CAPTCHA in the way. Reddit got blocked by Cloudflare (the agent asked the human to solve it); Discord looped for 7 minutes ($4.37 burned); Indeed hit SMS verification; Craigslist was blocked; Airbnb crashed mid-run.
- Total: 1.95M tokens, $19.68 — blocked steps burn tokens too. The Etsy step cost $5.86 on Astra vs $0.04 on DeepSeek V4 Flash, roughly 150x cheaper.
- Scraping vendor decodo admits Astra 'does not fix blocks, geo-restrictions, CAPTCHAs, or rate limits' — a big gap between the viral demo game and production anti-bot defenses. OTP via email worked flawlessly on every site that used it.
Takeaway: models are getting close to solving CAPTCHAs, but deployed defenses still hold — for now.
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