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

OpenAI announces its "next major model" Astra by dropping ten previously unsolved math solutions Matthias Bastian View the LinkedIn Profile of Matthias Bastian Aug 1, 2026 Nano Banana Pro prompted by THE DECODER 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. Ask about this article… Search Update – Aug 1, 2026 Added Astra announcement and math paper. Update: 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.Ad Thomas Bloom, a University of Manchester mathematician who runs erdosproblems.com, called the results "big news" on X. He considers them more significant than the counterexample to the unit distance conjecture published in May. "Maybe not bigger than a proof of unit distance would have been, but in terms of constructions, this is big," Bloom wrote.AdDEC_D_Incontent-1 Bloom also rejected the idea that AI is replacing mathematicians, arguing that the claim makes little sense when the AI draws on more than a century of mathematical theory, was built by mathematicians, and was trained on everything mathematicians have ever written. Noam Brown, one of the researchers behind the test-time reasoning technology used by Astra, said on X that OpenAI had also tried and failed to crack other major problems. "Sadly, no Millennium Prize Problems (yet)," he wrote. The Clay Mathematics Institute offers $1 million for solving each of the seven Millennium Prize Problems, but only one has been solved since the prizes were announced in 2000. Brown added, "But also, we didn't spend a lot on each problem. It's possible to push test-time compute much further." He called Astra a "major step for scientific reasoning."Ad Astra's solutions would cost about $2,000 at API rates 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 of mathematical correctness, and 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, however, came from Astra.AdDEC_D_Incontent-2 The company argued that claiming human authorship for a proof generated entirely by AI would misrepresent both the system's contribution and the nature of genuine human intellectual work, pointing to the Leiden Declaration on AI and Mathematics as a reference f