OpenAI is scrapping the planned release of its next-generation AI model after researchers raised safety concerns during internal testing, Newsweek has confirmed.

An OpenAI spokesperson told Newsweek Monday evening that safety leaders made the decision not to ship GPT-6.1 Astra, which was set for an October debut. The decision was first reported by The Wall Street Journal.

"For anything regarding safety and alignment, there's a trade off. You really do need to find what's the right line between staying within scope, but also avoiding laziness in terms of how the model actually pursues tasks even when it hits friction," Saachi Jain, OpenAI's head of safety systems, said in a statement. 

GPT-6.1 Astra did not perform as well as Astra GPT-6 on alignment evaluations, the spokesperson said.

The model "didn't quite meet the bar in terms of staying within scope and authorization, and how it communicates back to the user about the ...