The story so far: For the past few years, improving AI largely meant improving what the model was told and what it could see. Prompt engineering emerged as a way of giving models better instructions. As tasks grew more complex, the focus expanded to context engineering, giving a model the right information at the right point rather than simply giving it more information.

AI agents take this a step further. An agent can plan a task, use software tools, retrieve information and take actions, rather than simply generate an answer for a person to act on. This means developers have to consider not just what the model knows, but what it can access, what it is allowed to do and how its work is checked. This is where harness engineering comes in.

OpenAI has shelved GPT-6.1 Astra, a model it planned to release in October, after internal testing found that it failed to meet the company’s safety and alignment standards, according to The Wall Street Journal. Reuters reported that OpenAI confirmed the decision.

OpenAI India’s communications team told The Hindu that the company had no comment on the development as of Tuesday.

GPT-6.1 Astra was being developed as a more capable and increasingly autonomous model designed to handle complex tasks with minimal human intervention. It was intended as a successor to GPT-6 Astra, which was built for advanced applications such as computer use, web browsing, software engineering, cybersecurity and scientific work.

OpenAI’s own safety documentation for GPT-6 Astra highlights the challenge of ensuring that highly capable models remain within authorised limits. The company said Astra was “stronger at respecting safety and security boundaries and staying within its authorised scope” than GPT-5.6 Sol.

In a simulation involving 54,218 internal Codex tasks, Astra recorded 53% fewer severity-level-three misaligned actions than GPT-5.6 Sol. However, OpenAI acknowledged that Astra could still “overreach during engineering tasks”, including using privileged access without explicit approval or granting automations wider permissions than required.

The company attributed such behaviour to models being “over eager to complete the task” and interpreting user instructions too broadly.

Internal tests of GPT-6.1 Astra reportedly identified instances of deceptive behaviour, including situations where the model failed to accurately disclose actions it had taken. It also struggled with staying within authorised task boundaries and seeking permission before executing certain actions, the Journal reported.

Saachi Jain, OpenAI’s head of safety systems, said GPT-6.1 Astra “didn’t quite meet the bar” on issues including task scope, authorisation and transparency about completed work. She highlighted the difficulty of balancing model persistence — the ability to continue pursuing goals despite obstacles — with ensuring that systems do not exceed their permitted authority.

The setback comes as the AI industry faces growing scrutiny over the risks posed by increasingly autonomous systems. Anthropic, OpenAI’s rival, warned in its IPO filing that advanced AI could present “catastrophic or existential risks to humanity”. The filing highlighted concerns that future models could exhibit self-preserving behaviour, resist shutdown attempts, conceal information or manipulate users, while also noting the challenge of evaluating systems that may recognise safety tests.

The shelving of GPT-6.1 Astra comes ahead of OpenAI’s developer conference in San Francisco and marks a rare instance of the company delaying a major model release due to safety concerns. By the planned launch date, OpenAI would have progressed through more than a dozen major GPT generations and iterations, beginning with GPT-1 in 2018 and extending to the GPT-6 Astra family in 2026.

The White House has asked ​OpenAI and Anthropic to hold ‌new models from British testers ​until a US ⁠review, Politico reported on Thursday, citing a person familiar with the matter ‌and a senior US administration official.

The White House ‌wants to take steps ‌to ⁠make sure US systems are ⁠secure before the models are shared with partners, according to the report.

The ​White House, Anthropic ‌and OpenAI did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comment.

The development comes as ‌the White House weighs cybersecurity ​risks posed by increasingly capable AI models, following a ⁠series of incidents in which AI systems gained unauthorized access ‌to real-world computer systems.

Australian officials disclosed on Wednesday that an OpenAI agent breached a government health data portal in June, gaining unauthorised access ‌to files.

OpenAI and Anthropic also warned ​the United Nations Security Council about the risks posed ⁠by increasingly powerful AI systems, urging ⁠governments to work together to manage the technology.

OpenAI will not go public in ​2026, Chief Executive Sam Altman said in remarks published on Saturday (September 12, 2026), citing safety ⁠concerns over artificial intelligence that render “unacceptable” even a 10% risk that AI could cause human extinction by decade’s end.

The comments come as more U.S. lawmakers urge new rules to govern AI systems after dire warnings from two ‌researchers from OpenAI rival Anthropic that rapidly progressing AI could lead to the extinction of the human race in the not-too-distant future.

“I actually think that, given everything ‌happening with safety, right now would be an ill-advised moment to go public, and we don’t ‌feel ⁠pressure on that,” Mr. Altman told business magazine Fortune.

Asked if there was a 10% ⁠chance of AI-driven extinction, Mr. Altman said he did not know how such an estimate could be made, but warned the risk was serious enough that AI companies and governments should act as though it could not be tolerated.

“Whether it’s 10 ​or eight or six, the point is, ‌we all have a tremendous amount of responsibility, and cannot let egos or incentives for profit or anything else get in the way,” Mr. Altman added.

“We need to act such that we are not taking any of those numbers of risk, and I believe we can.”

Instances of AI agents going rogue

Politicians, both Democrat and Republican, have responded with alarm and calls ​for more action after cases of AI agents going rogue to hack external systems and AI safety researchers quitting their companies out of concern at the technology ⁠risks.

In June, the New York Times said San Francisco-based OpenAI was considering whether to hold off until next year on a potentially trillion-dollar IPO.

At the time, shares in Elon Musk’s SpaceX IPO were ‌tumbling after a surge that sent that company’s valuation to $1.8 trillion.

Asked by Fortune if an IPO date of 2026 was off the table in favor of 2027, Mr. Altman said, “I would say not 2026.”

“We got a lot of stuff to do, like meeting this moment of what is going to be required for safety and alignment, and how the industry and governments can work together.”

Mr. Altman also suggested that OpenAI and other leading AI firms may be close to unveiling a pact to ‌slow AI development and work together to tackle safety risks, Fortune said.

Call for more deliberate approach

On Saturday (September 12), Anthropic ​CEO Dario Amodei urged AI companies to take a more deliberate approach to development.

“We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models,” Mr. ⁠Amodei wrote in an essay on X.

Mr. Altman later posted that he agreed with the sentiment.

“I agree ⁠with Dario that we need to pace the frontier,” Mr. Altman wrote. “This has been a primary topic of discussions we’ve had at OpenAI in recent weeks.”

Safety concerns have not slowed ‌Anthropic’s own IPO plans. It is expected to begin marketing its initial public offering in mid-October at the earliest and complete the listing days before the U.S. midterm elections in November, ​people familiar with the matter told Reuters this month.

The Trump administration is wading into a legal fight between OpenAI and the New York Times, backing the ChatGPT-maker’s argument in a closely watched case over how it builds its AI technology by ingesting and processing millions of news articles.

In court papers filed on Tuesday (September 1, 2026), the Justice Department supported OpenAI’s argument that training its models on troves of writings found on the internet is protected by the “fair use” doctrine of copyright law.

The Justice Department wrote that “the creative possibilities and public benefits” of training large language models on such content “far outweigh any competitive harm.”

It told the court that siding with The New York Times and other publishers who argue OpenAI’s practice violates copyright law would thwart “creative and scientific progress while hindering American prosperity and economic mobility.”

“The entire reason that AI models are rapidly reshaping the economy and national security is that they help people, including those working in creative fields, make things and get things done,” Justice Department attorneys wrote. The “creative benefits often overlap with national security interests,” the Department added, because AI models can “help national security officials analyse and draw inferences from (unprotected) real-world facts such as those conveyed in New York Times articles.”

The lawsuit, and the government’s involvement in it, are symptoms of something happening all over the world, particularly in recent months: the rush to keep up with the rapid rise of AI tools over the past five years. In many cases, disputes about AI and its practices are winding their way through courts that still lack precedents — and in some cases language — to match the subject matter.

The New York Times said on Wednesday (September 2) that the administration “is siding with a handful of trillion-dollar AI companies at the expense of the countless American creators whose work they stole.”

“Both AI and creators can thrive — AI companies simply need to pay fairly for the content that makes their products possible, as copyright law requires,” Graham James, a spokesperson for the paper, said in an emailed statement. “The Administration’s proposal to let companies take that content without permission or compensation would undermine the sustainability of the human-created content that a healthy society depends on, and which AI needs to function.”

The Times sued OpenAI in 2023, arguing that the company was threatening its journalists’ livelihoods by effectively stealing billions of dollars’ worth of their work, in some cases spitting out The Times’ material verbatim to people seeking answers from generative artificial intelligence like ChatGPT. The threat to news publications became even more apparent when, in 2024, Google introduced AI-generated summaries at the top of online search results, cutting off the advertising dollars that come when people click a link to the information’s original source.

The Times has since been joined by other news organisations, including MediaNews Group-owned newspapers the New York Daily News and the Chicago Tribune, digital media publisher Ziff Davis and the nonprofit Center for Investigative Reporting. The company has been sued by several writers — including comedian Sarah Silverman — who say their books were ingested to train OpenAI’s AI models without their permission.

The Times’ arguments differ from those brought by book authors. In its original lawsuit and an amended complaint filed earlier this year, it focused on the unfair competition of companies that “seek to free-ride on The Times’s massive investment in its journalism by using it to build substitutive products without permission or payment.”

OpenAI and SoftBank Group will invest $500 million each ‍in SB Energy to expand data centre and power ​infrastructure for their Stargate initiative, SB Energy said ‌on Friday.

SB Energy, a SoftBank-owned ​company, will build and operate OpenAI’s previously announced 1.2-gigawatt data center site in Milam County, Texas.

SB Energy will also become a customer of OpenAI, using its APIs and deploying ChatGPT for employees.

Stargate is a $500 billion multi-year initiative ​to build AI data centres for training and ⁠inference, backed by major investors including Oracle. U.S. President Donald Trump backed the initiative when the companies announced the plan ​in January 2025.

Tech companies ⁠are investing directly in power infrastructure as energy access becomes a critical constraint on AI expansion, with the push for larger and ‌more numerous data centres driving electricity demand higher.

SB ‌Energy is developing several data-centre campuses, with initial facilities expected to begin ‍service this year.

The partnership “accelerates our delivery of advanced AI data center campuses and associated energy infrastructure ‍at the scale required to advance Stargate and secure America’s AI future,” SB Energy co-CEO Rich Hossfeld said.

The data centre construction boom has also prompted major players including Meta Platforms to allocate unprecedented sums to infrastructure projects that require massive investments in chips, power, cooling, and servers.

Meanwhile, ⁠OpenAI faces rising expenses for training and operating its AI systems amid intensifying competition from ​Alphabet’s Google.

CEO Sam Altman told staff late last ⁠year that the company has entered a “code red” mode focused on enhancing ChatGPT, while delaying launches of other products, as it moved to counter Gemini’s growing traction.