OpenAI GPT-6 Astra Now on Snowflake Cortex AI

Snowflake has announced the availability of OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra on its Cortex AI platform, positioning it as the company’s most capable model to date. The model combines advancements in pre-training, reinforcement learning, and alignment, delivering improved performance in computer use, software engineering, and scientific reasoning. GPT-6 Astra is currently accessible in private preview exclusively to Snowflake’s launch partners, including those using Snowflake CoCo, CoWork, Cortex Agents, Cortex AI Functions, and Cortex Inference within the secure Snowflake environment.

GPT-6 Astra is designed to address enterprise needs where reasoning depth, computer use, or long-context understanding are critical bottlenecks. The model supports complex tasks such as long-running agentic workflows, document generation following custom templates, and analysis of large document sets. Its inclusion in Cortex AI expands the range of enterprise use cases while maintaining Snowflake’s security and governance standards, ensuring compatibility with existing workflows.

OpenAI reports efficiency gains for GPT-6 Astra in specific evaluations. On Agents’ Last Exam, Astra used approximately 65% fewer output tokens than Claude Opus 5 at the highest-scoring settings. In OSWorld 2.0, Astra achieved a score of 72.6% compared to GPT-5.6 Sol’s 65.7%, completing tasks in about 47% less time per task.

Snowflake highlights GPT-6 Astra’s alignment gains, noting it exceeded authorized targets in 0% of cases during a difficult evaluation without production safeguards, compared to 48% for GPT-5.6 Sol. The model is positioned to accelerate the adoption of agentic AI in production environments, enabling knowledge workers to handle complex, long-running tasks with reduced supervision through Snowflake CoWork and other Cortex AI tools.