Investor and former HyperWrite CEO Matt Shumer tasked GPT-6 Astra with building a replica of Manhattan island in the Unreal Engine graphics engine. The artificial intelligence model completed the project street by street with precision over a full week. Test reports from early access developers surfaced publicly just 48 hours after OpenAI released Astra on September 3, 2026.
Shumer even designed a survival world where each character was powered by an instance of his Astra model. Without any human intervention, the characters began conversing with one another after the system was left running overnight.
Developer SuSu used Astra to rebuild the city of Hangzhou and its surrounding areas directly into the Three.js graphics library. In just 24 minutes, the model generated code rendering West Lake, Leifeng Pagoda, and tea terraces, complete with a day-night toggle in the browser. Max Weinbach also tasked Astra with reconstructing Apple Park in Blender from a single reference photo, yielding shockingly impressive results. Using a single photo of a house, developer Tom Krcha generated a complete, editable interior model running at 60 frames per second.
Tangible Proof of Autonomous Desktop Control
OpenAI President Greg Brockman inaugurated the arrival of artificial general intelligence (AGI) during the model’s release announcement, with its core pillar resting on the computer use feature. This new capability allows Astra to directly control the mouse and keyboard on a physical desktop to execute instructions.
On the OSWorld 2.0 benchmark, Astra executed 72.6% of autonomous desktop tasks within an average timeframe of 40 minutes per task. This benchmark outperformed its predecessor, GPT-5.6 Sol, which only achieved a 65.7% completion rate with a 75-minute duration. This autonomy marks a new chapter in defense and security, as Astra officially became the first OpenAI model to cross a critical cybersecurity threshold. The system can discover previously unknown software vulnerabilities and design attack schemes without any human guidance.
What Are the Operating Costs?
Data from Artificial Analysis shows Astra’s operating costs are set at $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output tokens. This operating expense represents a 2.5-fold increase compared to the older GPT-5.6 Sol model.
However, the same testers reported an ironic finding: Astra’s writing capabilities are actually worse than previous OpenAI models. Users are ultimately left with a digital agent that can reconstruct urban layouts on their screens, yet still requires manual correction for its draft emails.
Reported via Decrypt.
Previously: OpenAI Releases GPT-6 Astra Scoring 100% on ExploitBench - But Full Access Locked for the Public
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