OpenAI announces its “next major model” Astra by dropping ten previously unsolved math solutions

Aug 1, 2026

Key Points

• OpenAI is working on a new AI model family called “Astra,” built to handle long-running tasks and complex problems by coordinating multiple agents working together.
• CEO Sam Altman has already showcased Astra in Washington, D.C. The models are currently being tested and will be the first to go through a planned U.S. government review process that requires official approval before public release.
• The project reflects OpenAI’s broader ambition to build AI systems capable of working on problems continuously for hours or even days at a time.

Update – Aug 1, 2026

OpenAI has released its math report, officially confirming the Astra name for the first time. The company says an internal version of Astra, its “next major model family,” solved ten open problems in math and theoretical computer science. Mathematicians had made no progress on any of them for at least a decade, and much longer in most cases.

The results cover fields ranging from high-dimensional geometry and coding theory to group theory, quantum complexity, lattice cryptography, and extremal combinatorics. One proof establishes the existence of non-sofic groups, resolving a major open question in group theory.

Thomas Bloom (University of Manchester, erdosproblems.com) called the results “big news” on X, considering them more significant than the counterexample to the unit distance conjecture published in May (for constructions).

Noam Brown said OpenAI had also tried and failed to crack other major problems: “Sadly, no Millennium Prize Problems (yet).” He added they didn’t spend a lot on each problem and that it’s possible to push test-time compute much further. He called Astra a “major step for scientific reasoning.”

Cost and verification

OpenAI says the tokens used to generate all ten solutions would have cost about $2,000 at Sol’s API rates. After the model produced its arguments, humans worked with the same model to turn them into research papers. The model also formalized each proof in Lean, creating machine-checkable certificates. OpenAI published a walkthrough of the model’s reasoning process for each solution.

OpenAI said its researchers helped prepare the papers and formalize the proofs, and that the company takes responsibility for their accuracy. The mathematical arguments themselves came from Astra. The company referenced the Leiden Declaration on AI and Mathematics regarding credit assignment.

Background (pre-confirmation reporting)

The Information previously reported Astra as a new model class alongside Sol, Terra, and Luna, designed for multi-agent long-running tasks. Whether it ships as GPT-6 or a GPT-5.x variant (e.g. GPT-5.7) was undecided. Astra is expected to be among the first models under a planned Trump administration pre-release federal review framework.

Primary OpenAI page (JS-gated at scrape time): https://openai.com/index/ten-advances-in-mathematics/