GPT-6 Astra
OpenAI's most capable GPT-6 model, built for the hardest end-to-end work.
GPT-6 Astra is OpenAI's newest frontier model, verified live 2026-09-16/17 directly against OpenAI's own API pricing and model-detail pages. TheRouter routes it exclusively through the OpenAI Responses API (matching OpenAI's own guidance that reliable tool calling for this model requires Responses, not Chat Completions). It carries a genuine long-context tier above 272K input tokens (input/cached-input/cache-write rates double, output rises 1.5x), the same shape as the GPT-5.6 family.
- • Frontier reasoning, coding, and agentic workloads that need OpenAI's latest model via the Responses API
- • Integrations that only support Chat Completions and cannot call the Responses API
Modalities
Capabilities
Pricing Breakdown
| Type | Rate |
|---|---|
| Prompts up to 272K tokens | |
| Input | $10.80 / 1M tokens |
| Output | $54.00 / 1M tokens |
| Cached input | $1.08 / 1M tokens |
| Cache write (5m) | $13.50 / 1M tokens |
| Prompts over 272K tokens | |
| Input | $21.60 / 1M tokens |
| Output | $81.00 / 1M tokens |
| Cached input | $2.16 / 1M tokens |
| Cache write | $27.00 / 1M tokens |
Tiered pricing: when a request's prompt (input, cached tokens included) is over 272K tokens, every token in that request is billed at the long-context rates; exactly 272K is still the base rate.
Supported Parameters
Specifications
| Context window | 1,050,000 tokens | verified |
| Max output tokens | 128,000 tokens | verified |
| Release date | September 3, 2026 | verified |
| License | Commercial via OpenAI API | verified |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | Distribution | Score | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
Not publicly disclosed | — | Not publicly disclosed | — |
API Usage Examples
Use the global api.therouter.ai endpoint shown below for new integrations; the legacy China accelerated endpoint is retired.
curl https://api.therouter.ai/v1/chat/completions -H "Content-Type: application/json" -H "Authorization: Bearer $THE_ROUTER_API_KEY" -d '{
"model": "openai/gpt-6-astra",
"messages": [
{"role": "user", "content": "Summarize the key points from this input."}
]
}'API guide
Responses API
curl https://api.therouter.ai/v1/responses \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $THEROUTER_API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"model":"openai/gpt-6-astra","input":"Hello"}'More from openai
Similar models
Cross-provider sibling modelsRelated news
Guides
Fact ledger — every claim on this page traces here
| source | URL | retrieved | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Context window | — | — | verified |
| Max output tokens | — | — | verified |
| Release date | — | — | verified |
| License | — | — | verified |
| Not publicly disclosed | developers.openai.com ↗ | 2026-09-16 | unknown |