Three undocumented model identifiers — aurora-red-alpha, aurora-green-alpha and aurora-blue-alpha — briefly appeared in OpenAI's developer API over the weekend of October 17-18, then were removed, in what TestingCatalog calls a likely accidental rollout. The sightings were first flagged via a Dev Mode Discord alert and shared on X by researcher scaling01.

Within hours the same names turned up in blind Arena tests producing images. TestingCatalog and Lumina, which shared sample outputs, lean toward the three being a forthcoming GPT-Image-3 family: in early tests red ran faster with lower quality, green was slower and looked better, and blue had not yet been tested. That identification is still a guess — earlier speculation tied an 'aurora-alpha' name that surfaced on OpenRouter in February 2026 to a GPT-5.3-Codex-Spark variant.

OpenAI has published no announcement, pricing, rate limits or documentation for any Aurora model, and has not confirmed what they are. Until it does, this stays rumor-tier: a real sighting of real identifiers, with the product behind them unconfirmed.