Comment by fn-mote

Because it is.

From OpenAI

9.2.1 CoT Controllability

We find that GPT-6 Astra’s CoT controllability is substantially higher than that of GPT-5.6 Sol and GPT-5.5 Thinking (Figure 28)....For example, among CoTs between 750 and 1,250 tokens long, GPT-6 Astra successfully controls 60.9%, compared with 16.1% for GPT-5.6 Sol and 1.7% for GPT-5.5 Thinking. This increase in controllability is consistent across the three datasets (Figure 29) and across the eight CoT instruction types (Figure 30). Qualitatively, GPT-6 Astra is now capable of generating very long CoTs satisfying complex constraints, e.g., alternating between lowercase and uppercase letters (Table 9) and pretending to reason about a different question (Table 10).[1]

9.3 External Evaluation for Monitorability - UK AISI

To assess monitorability, UK AISI evaluated Astra using four non-agentic evaluations:

No-CoT math time horizon: Astra can solve significantly more difficult math problems in a single forward pass than past models. UK AISI measured Astra’s time horizon at 30.9 minutes compared to 3.6 minutes for GPT 5.6 Sol (Figure 1). [2]

[1]https://deploymentsafety.openai.com/gpt-6-astra/cot-controll...

[2]https://deploymentsafety.openai.com/gpt-6-astra/external-eva...

Outside OpenAI

Astra has 8.6x better odds of doing a reasoning task without CoT than the next best model (Fable 5.1), and can do 7.2 serial arithmetic steps in a forward pass vs 4.1 for the next best model (Gemini 3.8 Flash/Fable 5.1) [3]

[3]https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/eRmzz8J8Qkzqvzrgg/astra-can-...

[4]https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ntKx9YHWCwxSeGbRB/estimating...

[5]https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FsCkkoGsNmPzFKRhg/gpt-6-astr...