Safety researchers say OpenAI's Astra reasons less in visible text. Its chief scientist co-authored the 2025 paper asking developers to report this.

OpenAI’s new Astra model will use “recurrent depth,” a technique that allows the model to operate outside of the sequential thinking that characterizes most reasoning models.

Some worry Astra represents a dangerous step toward AI models with opaque reasoning. OpenAI’s chief scientist says the company is committed to ensuring its models’ “chain of…