Epoch AI: GPT-6 Astra nearly saturates the EBR-bench board-game benchmark
Poll finds no rise in US cyber incidents since Claude Fable 5
Confirmed
Status
- Claim
Confirmed
- Our reporting
- High confidence
- Importance
- 2 of 5
- Last verified
- 13 October 2026
Your AI and this story
- GPT-6 Astra160 days after its cutoff
- Claude Opus 5.599 days after its cutoff
- Gemini 3.8 Flash190 days after its cutoff
- Grok 4.7129 days after its cutoff
None of these four assistants can know about it. The closest, Claude Opus 5.5, stops 99 days before it.
Key facts
- EBR-bench update by Benjamin Ou and Avery Yen: GPT-6 Astra 19.8/21 with the card allowed (Claude Opus 5 second at 10.5); first try 11, second try 21; a top human needed about six tries to reach the maximum
- The card, combined with others, removes the game’s turn limit (Astra took 88 turns with it, 42 without); Epoch banned it (‘we decided to ban that card moving forward’) and admits it overlooked the card when designing the benchmark; the top human baseliner used the same card
- With the ban: Astra averages 16/21 (best 20); Claude Fable 5.1, Claude Opus 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol show no significant change; no evidence of memorization or cheating
- Subagents (up to four) improved deck exploration significantly only for Claude Opus 5; topline scores did not change significantly
- ‘We therefore expect EBR-bench to be fully saturated within a few months.’
- Cyber poll (Caroline Falkman Olsson, Yafah Edelman): Ipsos KnowledgePanel, June 12–14 (n = 1,021) and Sept 18–20, 2026 (n = 1,024); share reporting at least one incident in the past 12 months: 46.2% (90% CI 43.6–48.8) → 44.6% (42.0–47.2)
- By type, June → September: convincing or targeted spam 32.2% → 32.1%; data leaked in a hack 19.8% → 18.2%; service stopped by an attack 7.8% → 6.1%; account break-in 7.9% → 6.0%; malware 5.7% → 5.0%; ransom lockout 2.1% → 0.9%
- Caveats: recall periods of the two waves overlap; the poll cannot attribute incidents to AI; small changes in single incident types could go undetected
What happened
EBR-bench measures whether a model gets better at a long game by playing it again and again. GPT-6 Astra found, within two playthroughs, a card combination that lifts the turn limit, and scored at or near the maximum. Epoch banned the card and re-scored: Astra still leads by a wide margin.
The same day Epoch published a survey check on a common fear. Claude Fable 5 (June 2026) was the first widely available model with strong offensive cyber skills. Three months later the share of US adults who say they were hit by a cyber incident has not moved in a way the poll can detect.
Why it matters
The benchmark result is an example of a model finding a loophole that the designers missed, and of a “learning from experience” test nearing saturation within months of release. The poll is weak evidence (overlapping 12-month recall windows, about 1,000 people per wave) against a broad consumer-level rise in cyber harm; it says nothing about attacks on companies or infrastructure.
Sources
2 sources from 1 site. Numbers match the chips in the text.
2 sources: 2 primary
Primary
Changes
- Filed (both Epoch pages read directly)