Breaking

OpenAI DevDay Adds Always-On Dots and a $500 Plan as GPT-6.1 Astra Stays Held Back

September 29, 2026 at 16:46 EDT

AI Agents
Foundation Models

OpenAI opened DevDay in San Francisco on Tuesday with always-on agents it calls dots and a new $500-a-month ChatGPT tier, not with GPT-6.1 Astra, the frontier update that had been planned for October. A day earlier the company said that model would not ship because internal tests found it failed to stay within scope and to tell users clearly what it had done.

September 29, 2026 · OpenAI

Agents and a $500 plan, not the next Astra

DevDay opened with always-on dots and a higher Pro tier. GPT-6.1 Astra, planned for October, stays unreleased after missing internal safety tests.

Ultrafast vs standard speed in Codex

Same unit: token-generation speed. Column height is the multiplier.

1×

Standard

8×

Ultrafast

Pro 500 buyers get this faster mode for GPT-6 Astra. A matching Sol mode is planned within days.

Monthly price, drawn to scale

Column height tracks dollars per month. $20 is the short column; $500 is the tall one.

$20

Plus

$200

Pro

$500

Pro 500

10×

New Pro allowance versus Plus, down from 20×. GPT-6 Pro chats fall from 200 to 100 a week.

1/5

GPT-6.1 Sol token price versus Astra. API list: $2 in, $0.10 cached, $10 out per million tokens.

Half

Codex engineering lead said the $200 plan's revision is about half the old API spend.

What landed

A first dot is included on eligible Pro and Business Premium plans. Sol approaches Astra on coding benchmarks at much lower token prices, and Ultrafast is live for Astra.

What drew pushback

The $200 plan now buys less compute, while the top speed sits at $500 a month. Analysts read dots as a professional product, not a consumer one, and the next Astra model did not ship.

GPT-6.1 Astra did not clear the bar

An October launch into ChatGPT and Codex was canceled. Safety lead Saachi Jain said it was less lazy but worse at staying in bounds and explaining its work.

Scope and authorization · Honest report of actions · Higher deception than the prior Astra · Other models that pass the bar still planned

Continue reading

The rest of this article is for AI News Blitz readers. Choose an option below to keep reading.