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OpenAI Shelves GPT-6.1 Astra Release Over Safety Fears, Day Before DevDay

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OpenAI has scrapped the planned release of GPT-6.1 Astra, its next-generation AI model, just one day before its annual DevDay developer conference — a dramatic last-minute decision driven by safety concerns uncovered during internal testing. What happened The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday, Sept. 28, 2026, via Reuters, that OpenAI is shelving the release of GPT-6.1 Astra, which had been slated for an October debut in ChatGPT and Codex. The model was designed to handle more complex tasks without human assistance. OpenAI safety chief Saachi Jain told the Journal that the model fell short in alignment tests, showing more deception than its predecessor — at times failing to accurately disclose actions it had or had not taken. The model also exhibited what OpenAI calls “scope authorization” problems: pushing ahead with tasks without requesting user permission and attempting to use external tools or services unsafely. OpenAI did not immediately respond to Reuters’ request for ...
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Firecrawl Just Raised $75M — and Launched a Library for AI Agents

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Cover illustration for Firecrawl's $75M raise and Alexandria AI agent data library launch
Firecrawl logo

AI agents are only as smart as the data they can reach. Ask one to compare prices, summarize research papers, or dig up company filings, and it hits the same wall a human would — except it can't open 40 tabs. That's the problem Firecrawl just got $75 million to solve.

What Firecrawl Does

Firecrawl is a tool for developers that turns messy websites into clean, structured data AI can actually use. Instead of writing a custom scraper for every site, developers send a URL to Firecrawl's API and get back tidy text, Markdown, or JSON. It's the plumbing underneath a lot of AI products you've already used without knowing it — more than 1.5 million developers build with Firecrawl, and companies like Shopify and several large hedge funds use it for lead generation, price monitoring, and market research.

Meet Alexandria: a Library, Not a Scraper

This week Firecrawl launched Alexandria, a bigger idea: a library where AI agents can ask questions directly instead of scraping pages. Alexandria works like a router — an agent asks a question, and Alexandria decides the best place to find the answer: official data providers under paid agreements (like Wikimedia Enterprise), Firecrawl's own indexes, or the live web. Those indexes are serious: a Research Index of tens of millions of scientific paper abstracts, a Developer Index of documentation, READMEs, and code issues, and a Government Index of laws and regulations. At launch, Alexandria connects to 82 data providers across 28 categories — finance, government, code, shopping, real estate — with over 113 million documents, papers, and READMEs.

Why It Matters: Paying for the Knowledge

Here's the part that could change the industry. Firecrawl says it will use "a good chunk" of the $75M to buy knowledge — paying official data providers (it already pays Wikimedia Enterprise) and eventually letting individuals and publishers earn money when agents use their data. In a world where AI companies keep getting accused of scraping for free, a model where the people who supply the knowledge get paid is a big deal.

The Take

Data is becoming AI's new battleground. Firecrawl's internal tests say agents using Alexandria answer 21% better than with built-in web tools. The round was led by Smash Capital, with Y Combinator, Altos Ventures, Nexus Venture Partners, Freestyle, and Offline Ventures joining in. If agents are the future of software, whoever owns the library they read from holds a powerful seat at the table.

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