The Hugging Face breach in July highlights the importance of being able to inspect what models are ‘thinking’, say analysts
3-MIN READ3-MIN ListenChong Ming LeePublished: 6:31pm, 4 Sep 2026Updated: 6:33pm, 4 Sep 2026OpenAI’s new model, GPT-6 Astra, has less direct visibility into how a model thinks, a development that has sparked concerns coming just weeks after the Hugging Face hacking incident that required a Chinese open model to investigate, according to analysts.When announcing Astra on Thursday, OpenAI said it was “the world’s most intelligent and aligned model,” with a “significant jump in cyber capabilities”.
OpenAI president Greg Brockman said at the end of a press call announcing Astra’s arrival that it likely represents AGI, or artificial general intelligence – AI that matches or outperforms human intelligence.
However, OpenAI also said the model’s written reasoning was “harder to monitor” compared with GPT-5.6 Sol, the previous generation released in July.
“We have found that GPT-6 Astra is more capable of controlling its own CoT (chain of thought) than GPT-5.6 Sol, and less likely to include incriminating information in its CoT,” OpenAI said, referring to the intermediate reasoning steps an AI generates while solving a task.
The shift in visibility stems from a technique known as recurrent depth, or looped transformers, which reuses parts of a neural network. As a result, it processes complex logic inside hidden mathematical loops rather than in step-by-step readable text, The Information reported on Tuesday ahead of the launch.
