GPT-6 Astra: first on terminal engineering tasks, third tier on composite intelligence
The OpenAI flagship tier, officially positioned for hardest end-to-end work (gpt-6-astra): 1.05M-token context, 128K-token single output, knowledge cutoff 2026-04-30, with Functions, Web search, File search and Computer use built in, so search, retrieval and interface control ship with the model instead of an outer agent framework. Reasoning effort runs low to max in five steps while price stays fixed at $10/$50, so the cost lever is token consumption; siblings Sol ($2/$10) and Luna ($0.1/$0.5) make a 100x spread, so load splitting can stay inside one vendor. Readings (2026-09-22): #1 on Terminal-Bench 4.0 at 58.18% (n_trials=330, pass@5 0.7121), the protocol closest to a coding agent's daily life; #2 on Arena Agent with net_improvement 11.54 and confirmed_success 17.70, both below leader Fable 5.1, but the field's highest praise at 32.79; #6 and #7 on the intelligence index (max 52.67). The cutoff is nearly five months older than this page, so version numbers and API changes must go through Web search; computer-use reliability appears on no board; closed, API only. Graded A (confirmed); not independently benchmarked.
