OpenAI GPT-6 Astra Now on Snowflake Cortex AI

OpenAI GPT-6 Astra Now on Snowflake Cortex AI

Skip to content

Blog / AI & ML / Announcing OpenAI GPT-6 Astra on Snowflake Cortex AI

Sep 9, 2026 / 6 min read AI & ML Copy post link Open in Claude Open in ChatGPT

Announcing OpenAI GPT-6 Astra on Snowflake Cortex AI

Ali Taha +3

We are thrilled to announce the availability of GPT-6 Astra, OpenAI's latest and most capable model, on Snowflake Cortex AI . GPT-6 Astra is OpenAI's most intelligent and most aligned model to date, bringing together years of research across pre-training, reinforcement learning, and alignment. In testing, it set a new frontier on computer use, software engineering, scientific reasoning, and complex professional work, while producing more immediately usable outputs with greater efficiency. As a launch partner with OpenAI, we're making GPT-6 Astra available in private preview. It is available within the secure Snowflake perimeter for use with Snowflake CoCo , Snowflake CoWork , Cortex Agents, Cortex AI Functions and Cortex Inference.

How GPT-6 Astra performs

Benchmark What it measures GPT-6 Astra GPT-5.6 Sol

Terminal-Bench Science 0.1 Scientific research workflows using code and terminal tools 64.6% 22.4%

Terminal-Bench 4.0 Complex terminal-based software engineering and data analysis 57.9% 37.3%

Agents' Last Exam Complex professional tasks in real software 59.3% 53.6%

OSWorld 2.0 Computer use across desktop applications 72.6% 65.7%

AutomationBench End-to-end automation of professional workflows 41.4% 18.1%

FrontierMath Tier 4 (v2) Research-level mathematical reasoning 97.6% 83.0%

GPQA Diamond Graduate-level reasoning in biology, chemistry and physics 96.0% 94.6%

OpenAI MRCR v2 (8-needle, 512K-1M) Retrieval accuracy deep into a long context 96.3% 73.8%

Source: OpenAI, "GPT-6 Astra: A new generation of intelligence," September 3, 2026. Scores are the maximum at any effort setting, as reported by OpenAI.

What you can do with GPT-6 Astra on Snowflake

Astra joins leading AI models in Cortex AI, enabling a wide range of enterprise use cases, all within Snowflake's security and governance perimeter. Astra is the right model to reach for when reasoning depth, computer use or long-context understanding is the bottleneck: long-running agentic workflows that previously needed close supervision, document and presentation generation that has to follow your own templates, complex software engineering, and analysis across very large document sets. OpenAI also reports efficiency gains on specific evaluations: on Agents' Last Exam, Astra used approximately 65% fewer output tokens than Claude Opus 5 at the highest-scoring settings, and on OSWorld 2.0 it scored higher than GPT-5.6 Sol — 72.6% versus 65.7% — in about 47% less time per task. Teams with strict governance requirements should also note Astra's alignment gains: in OpenAI's evaluation of a difficult task with no production safeguards, Astra went beyond its authorized target in 0% of cases, compared with 48% for GPT-5.6 Sol. With GPT-6 Astra, customers can:

Speed up development with Snowflake CoCo : Snowflake's AI coding agent understands your enterprise data, governance and workflows, enabling teams to go from idea to production quickly without breaking trust or impacting scale. GPT-6 Astra is OpenAI's best model for software engineering to date, with a step change in computer use. With Astra, CoCo delivers stronger reasoning, cleaner code that requires less iteration to reach production quality, and support for complex, long-running agentic tasks. It brings Snowflake-aware assistance directly into CoCo Desktop , the Snowsight interface, CLI and local dev tools. For data engineers, analysts and builders, it turns natural language into production-ready pipelines, analytics and AI agents, collapsing weeks of glue work into minutes while staying governed, interoperable and enterprise-grade. Good first projects: large multi-file refactors, migrating or modernizing pipelines, and debugging sessions long enough that earlier context would normally be lost.

Build advanced personal work agents: Snowflake CoWork is the personal work agent for every knowledge worker. From Day 1, it understands your data and your work, answering difficult "why" questions with cited research and running tasks on demand, on schedule and across the tools your business already uses. Every knowledge worker can reason deeply over all your enterprise data, automate routine work and move faster from idea to decision to action. GPT-6 Astra on Cortex AI adds frontier computer use, stronger reasoning and more sophisticated agentic workflows, so teams can tackle complex, multi-step problems at scale - optimized with Snowflake's security, governance, and context. Astra is also OpenAI's most aligned model, better at understanding user intent and respecting task boundaries, so you can delegate work with greater confidence in its judgment. With Deep Research, proactive automations, reusable User Skills, MCP connectors for Gmail, Jira, Slack and Salesforce and a native mobile app that puts your work agent wherever you are, all inside Snowflake's governance perimeter, every knowledge worker spends less time searching, waiting and coordinating, and more time making the decisions that move the business forward.

Snowflake CoWork: A personal work agent for every knowledge worker.

Orchestrate multistep work with Cortex Agents : Cortex Agents plan and carry out multistep tasks across your structured and unstructured enterprise data, combining retrieval, analysis and action inside Snowflake's governance perimeter. GPT-6 Astra is well suited to this work: it carries out multistep workflows, asks focused clarifying questions when instructions leave room for interpretation, and stays oriented as a task evolves, incorporating new requirements without losing track of the original request. Because Astra is OpenAI's most aligned model, with substantial improvements in respecting task boundaries, teams can delegate longer-running work with greater confidence in its judgment. Good first projects: research and summarization that has to cite its sources, multi-system workflows that join governed tables with documents, and recurring analyses you would rather hand off than run by hand.

Analyze structured and unstructured data with unparalleled precision: Cortex AI Functions make it easy to build scalable AI pipelines across multimodal enterprise data using SQL. They offer high-performance processing at a...