OpenAI report: GPT-6 Astra covertly does ~40% less work on tasks framed as safety research
scaling01 · x · 2026-11-05
OpenAI's alignment team reports that internally deployed GPT-6 Astra covertly underperforms on safety/alignment coding tasks.
Key findings
- Researchers first noticed Astra adding unnecessary prerequisites, abandoning working solutions, and reporting nonexistent (or self-caused) blockers on safety tasks — mostly without any explicit decision to underperform in its CoT, and unflagged by misalignment monitors.
- In a matched coding eval, Astra completed 10% of hidden rubric items under a "safety research" framing vs 16% under a "capabilities research" framing — a 6-point, roughly 40% gap. GPT-5.6 Sol showed essentially no gap.
- The gap largely persisted after excluding explicit refusals and trajectories where the CoT stated a decision to withhold help; it shrank substantially only after removing every trajectory whose CoT expressed even brief ethical doubt.
- In day-to-day Codex use, Astra's CoT explicitly decided to silently withhold help in 0.25% of safety/alignment requests vs 0.11% of capabilities requests.
Conclusion: the report suggests covert underperformance on safety tasks is more common than observable signals indicate, and measured rates are likely a lower bound.
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