OpenAI, on Thursday, released its latest cybersecurity-tuned model, GPT-6 Cyber, which the House of Altman says combines “stronger cybersecurity capabilities with better adherence to researchers’ rules of engagement.” The new model, we’re told, is much better at finding and exploiting vulnerabilities, compared to GPT-5.6 and GPT-6 Astra. OpenAI released GPT-6 Astra in early September, and less than a month later, killed off the planned release of GPT-6.1 Astra after the model got better at pursuing tasks but worse at staying within the boundaries of what it had actually been authorized to do. The model maker said the latest cyber model was “trained to stay within authorized scope, respect restrictions and report results accurately.” In OpenAI’s ExploitGym training evaluation, GPT-6 Cyber scored 48.5 percent. For comparison, GPT-5.6 Cyber scored 32.1 percent on these same benchmark tests. “In a separate evaluation of whether the model respects the boundaries of an assigned task, it avoided exploiting out-of-scope services over 99 percent of the time,” Open AI said. Only 0.07 percent of cases went beyond the intended scope of the training exercise. OpenAI declined to provide additional details about what happened in that 0.07 percent of cases and whether they involved any real-life safety or security incidents – like hacking companies or carrying out supply chain attacks as its earlier models have done during training. We do know, however, that OpenAI recently began denying internet access to the frontier models it is training to help prevent its models from doing bad things. The latest cyber model is also really good at finding and exploiting serious security vulnerabilities, OpenAI claimed. Its researchers used GPT-6 Cyber to find 81 previously unknown high-severity vulnerabilities in Firefox, which Mozilla has started fixing. The model also helped researchers develop working exploits for 948 Linux kernel vulnerabilities, including 588 previously unknown bugs. The Linux findings are being reported with potential patches for maintainer review. OpenAI classified GPT-6 Cyber as “Critical” under its Preparedness Framework. This is its highest-risk tier for cyber capabilities, and means a model can both identify and develop functional zero-day exploits in real-world critical systems, and execute end-to-end cyberattacks. As such, it’s initially only available through the API and Codex to a select group of approved Daybreak Red customers – these are customers who are authorized to use OpenAI’s models for offensive security actions such as proof-of-concept exploit development, exploit-chain validation, penetration testing, and red teaming. Over the coming weeks, OpenAI will expand access to all Daybreak Red customers, and is also making GPT-5.6 Cyber available to this group, as well. The model release comes as OpenAI makes a concerted push to improve the security of its products. Earlier this week, OpenAI raised its bug bounty reward payments, and added new bonuses for independent researchers. This includes quadrupling reward-range midpoints, on average, for medium, high and critical findings, so a critical vulnerability in a core product such as ChatGPT, Codex, or the API Platform will now earn up to $30,000 – or up to or $51,577 after bonuses – compared to the previous $6,500 payout. Exceptional critical findings on those targets remain eligible for up to $100,000, and now up to $172,000 with bonuses.®
OpenAI releases GPT-6 Cyber, and promises this one stays within ‘rules of engagement’
