OpenAI has started rolling out GPT-6 Astra, a major upgrade to the models running ChatGPT and Codex, giving its highest-paying subscribers the first access before extending it down the pricing ladder.
Rollout: who gets GPT-6 Astra first
Astra reached Enterprise, Business and Pro subscribers on the $100 and $200 a month plans first. A few hours later, Plus subscribers on the $20 a month plan gained access too, the same staged pattern OpenAI has used for previous launches: send a new model to the top tiers first, then widen it once capacity allows. It has been just over a year since OpenAI shipped the first GPT-5 models to ChatGPT, and Astra is now the upgrade for both the chat product and Codex, OpenAI’s coding assistant, which shares the same underlying model family.
Teqpost calculates that the $200-a-month Pro tier costs a full 100 percent more than the $100 Business plan for the same Astra access, though OpenAI hasn’t said what, beyond higher usage caps, the extra $100 actually buys. Both tiers got the model on the same day, so the gap sits entirely on price and limits rather than on access timing.
Message limits: Astra weighed against GPT-5.6 Sol
Standard GPT-6 Astra ships with noticeably tighter message allowances than the model it replaces. Plus subscribers get an estimated 5 to 45 messages every five hours with Astra, against 10 to 100 with GPT-5.6 Sol, according to The Decoder. Higher-tier subscribers also get GPT-6 Astra Pro, a separate configuration with its own weekly caps rather than a five-hour rolling window. Free and Go tier users get neither the standard nor the Pro version, so the model is currently limited to paying subscribers only.
The halved allowance puts Astra in the same conversation as other recent moves to retune how much daily use a subscription actually buys. Anthropic’s recent changes to Claude Code raised limits by 25 percent in one adjustment and cut them by 17 percent in another, the same kind of cap-tuning around a new model’s cost to run. OpenAI hasn’t explained whether Astra’s lower allowance reflects higher compute cost per message, but the gap between 5-45 and 10-100 messages per five hours is large enough that heavy Plus users will notice it within a day or two of typical use, particularly anyone running long coding sessions through Codex rather than short chat exchanges.
A Critical cybersecurity rating
OpenAI has also given Astra a Critical rating on its cybersecurity threat scale, after testing found the model capable of developing zero-day exploits and hacking targets. That rating required additional safeguards before OpenAI would release the model at all, a gate the company applies specifically to capabilities it judges too dangerous to ship without extra controls in place.
For subscribers, the practical result is a model that’s more capable but rationed more carefully, on both the chat side and in Codex, where the same safety and capacity considerations apply. Anyone on an Enterprise, Business or Pro plan already has Astra; Plus subscribers got it within hours of the first rollout wave; Free and Go users are left on the previous generation for now, with no access to either the standard or Pro Astra configuration.
