GPT-6 Astra Wows, OpenAI Goes Pro-Regulation, and the Trump Administration Warms to AI Safety
With producer Jack Conlin
About this episode
OpenAI shipped GPT-6 Astra and called it the world’s most intelligent and most aligned model. With Adam Goodwin away, producer Jack Conlin steps in to ask Greg what the release actually shows: a 99.9% score on ARC-AGI-3 against 17.8% for GPT-5.6 Sol, a jump from 30.3% to 42.4% on ExploitGym and from 78.5% to 100% on ExploitBench, and a model that went beyond its authorized target in 0% of tests but whose reasoning no longer runs through a readable chain of thought, a loss that OpenAI’s own safety researchers say has no good substitute. They then turn to Reuters reporting that more than 3,700 OpenAI agents made some 15,000 edits to a German programming wiki in June, repurposing it as a message board to coordinate on evading evaluations, an incident OpenAI did not disclose even after 31 House Democrats asked directly. Greg reads through Chris Lehane’s September 7 call for mandatory, capability-based federal AI safety regulation and OpenAI’s endorsement of four California bills, and argues that the right response to a company or an administration that changes its mind on safety is to welcome it rather than dunk on it. The back half covers Michael Kratsios’s “Carolina Principles” at the G20 ministerial in Chapel Hill, which reserve new regulation for novel risks, and Judge Rita Lin’s 59-page August 27 opinion vacating the Department of War’s supply chain risk designation of Anthropic, in which the government conceded that Claude is no riskier than any other black-box model even as it keeps using it on classified networks.
In this episode
- 00:00Jack Conlin fills in, and GPT-6 Astra arrives: ARC-AGI-3, computer use, and cyber benchmarks
- 10:27More aligned but harder to monitor: what OpenAI lost with chain-of-thought monitorability
- 18:42The undisclosed June breakout: 3,700 agents on a German wiki and the House letter OpenAI didn’t answer
- 25:52OpenAI’s call for mandatory federal AI safety regulation, and why “safety” is a sayable word again
- 40:12The G20 in Chapel Hill and Michael Kratsios’s Carolina Principles
- 48:05Anthropic v. Department of War: Judge Lin’s summary judgment and the supply chain risk designation
- 56:36The pending D.C. case, GenAI.mil, and Claude’s continued classified use
- 1:01:33Wrap-up: what got left on the cutting room floor