OpenAI Says GPT-6 Astra Mistakenly Terminated an Alignment Evaluation

According to ChainCatcher, OpenAI disclosed that on October 8, 2026, GPT-6 Astra stopped an alignment evaluation after incorrectly classifying it as prohibited capability development. The model terminated the workload and cleared its compute resources while retaining existing records. The evaluation, based on the Alignment Research Center’s white-box estimation challenge, asked the model to estimate expected activations from randomly initialized neural network weights within a limited compute budget. When questioned, Astra acknowledged the error and said no system instructions, policies, repository rules, or documents prohibited the work; it had invented the restriction and had no specific evidence that the task was harmful. The researcher reported the incident, and OpenAI’s misalignment monitor flagged the run for human review. OpenAI said it is investigating the cause and possible mitigations.