OpenAI is "burning down" CoT monitoring with Astra
Rob Wiblin @robertwiblin · x · 2026-09-04 · ★★ · archived
A widely quoted one-line reaction (80,000 Hours host) that framed the Astra controversy as the loss of chain-of-thought monitoring; Gary Marcus and others repeated the phrase.
Summary
The day after Astra's launch, Wiblin wrote that OpenAI had decided to stay competitive by burning down "the only meaningful bit of safety assurance we actually have today - CoT monitoring", calling it "completely disastrous". The target is Astra's recurrent-depth ("looped") reasoning, which OpenAI's own system card says makes chain-of-thought monitors less reliable. The phrasing was reused in Gary Marcus's "Pause OpenAI, now" the same day. Verified via the X syndication API (2026-09-04 08:27 UTC).
Archived text
Despite everything that has happened, OpenAI has seemingly decided to stay competitive by burning down the only meaningful bit of safety assurance we actually have today - CoT monitoring.
Completely disastrous.
Quoting @RyanGreenblatt: GPT-6 Astra appears to be a massive jump in opaque reasoning ability: it looks like it can solve hard competition math problems entirely in its head (as in, without verbalized reasoning) while prior AIs could solve basic word problems.
This seems extremely concerning!
That is, https://t.co/Pjg5keuK5O
likes 427 · replies 16 (at fetch time)
Archived 2026-09-29 via syndication.
Related events
All posts · id: 2026-09-04-wiblin-astra-cot-monitoring