OpenAI says GPT-6 Astra designed a hardware device from scratch in under a week

OpenAI's hardware team reportedly used GPT-6 Astra to design a device for talking to the Codex coding agent, completing it as a side project in under a week, with Astra handling enclosure design, PCB layout, component selection, trace routing, firmware and the user interface. A contract manufacturer produced a small batch of prototypes in under a month, though several revision rounds were needed because Astra didn't always account for manufacturing constraints, tolerances and assembly details, and OpenAI plans to feed that data back into future models. OpenAI also said a newer "internal model" scores 0.875 on the BenchCAD 2.0 benchmark versus 0.594 for GPT-6 Astra at its highest reasoning level, without sharing details about the internal model.