OpenAI says GPT-6 Astra designed a hardware device for talking to Codex in under a week

According to The Decoder, OpenAI says its hardware team used GPT-6 Astra to design a device that lets users talk to the Codex coding agent. The team finished it as a side project in under a week. OpenAI says Astra handled every step: enclosure design, circuit board layout with component selection and trace routing, firmware and the user interface. A contract manufacturer produced a small batch of prototypes in under a month. Several revision rounds were needed, because Astra did not always account for manufacturing constraints, tolerances and assembly details. OpenAI also reported results on BenchCAD 2.0, a benchmark that tests whether models can reconstruct 3D parts and assemblies and identify connections on circuit boards. An unnamed newer "internal model" scored 0.875, while GPT-6 Astra at its highest reasoning level scored 0.594. OpenAI has not shared details about the internal model. The company says its hardware teams use Codex and ChatGPT for CAD models, manufacturing drawings and simulations in areas including robotics and compute infrastructure, and that their token usage has grown 23 times since February. These are OpenAI's own claims and have not been independently checked. The revision rounds show that physical engineering still needs human review, even when a model produces a complete first design. Separately, OpenAI is reported to be building its own consumer hardware device.