OpenAI's Sam Altman Tests Autonomous Agent Swarms With GPT-6 Astra, Signaling Major Shift Toward Extended AI Autonomy

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman revealed that he is running hundreds of autonomous agents nightly with GPT-6 Astra, underscoring the model's radical departure from conversational AI toward long-running, self-directed AI systems that operate without continuous human supervision. Astra, unveiled on September 3, 2026, represents a capability inflection point: rather than executing single tasks with defined endpoints, the model can now accept open-ended goals, independently choose methods, navigate software interfaces, recover from errors, and maintain context across multi-day work sessions.