The AI Wire ●

OpenAI launched the Grid Protectors Program on November 2, committing the compute campuses it directly develops to reduce electricity use during grid emergencies and extreme weather. The company says it will work with utilities, regulators and policymakers on site-by-site arrangements setting how much demand can be cut, how quickly and for how long, and will publish further commitments as they are finalised.

The pilot is Project Camellia, OpenAI's planned 3,200-megawatt campus in Effingham County, Georgia. Under a 25-year agreement with Georgia Power, up to 1,000 megawatts — about 31% of the campus's peak load, and roughly the average electricity use of 700,000 homes — will be available for curtailment. OpenAI says it will pay the full infrastructure and electric-service costs of serving the site, with contracted power delivered in phases between 2028 and 2032.

The savings figures are the utility's projections, not results: Georgia Power projects about $950 million in annual customer savings from 2029 across its large-load portfolio including this deal, or at least $15 a month for a typical home using 1,000 kilowatt-hours. OpenAI itself concedes the limit of the idea — campus flexibility 'cannot replace investment in new energy supply and transmission' — and the campus, which drew local protests over the summer, is still in development.

OpenAI is expanding the models that power Dots, its always-on agents in ChatGPT. Tibo Sottiaux, who leads Codex, posted late on November 2 that the Dots model family is growing to include GPT-6 Astra and GPT-6.1 Terra, with 'some other models later,' and that Dots will automatically select the model best suited to each task — and can combine multiple models to complete a single request.

Terra is the practical half of the change: Sottiaux positioned it as faster, with a noticeably upgraded personality, and said it 'will help us bring dots to more people.' Dots launched at DevDay on September 29, each with its own cloud computer, and the expansion moves the product from a single-model setup to models split by scenario — which changes both its cost structure and its response speed.

What has not been announced is any change to who gets Dots: OpenAI has published no new plan arrangements alongside the model expansion, and Tibo's post does not mention ChatGPT Plus. Replies to the post ran far ahead of reposts, with many users asking about quotas and availability — questions the announcement itself does not answer.

Users opening the ChatGPT Classic app are now greeted with a retirement date: the app will officially be retired on January 30, 2027, 9to5Mac reported on November 2. The banner tells users to move to the new ChatGPT app and promises their full chat history comes with them. Classic is the old native app, renamed when OpenAI shipped a new Electron-based desktop app that put ChatGPT, Work and Codex under one interface — a change users criticised as confusing, which president Greg Brockman himself called 'kind of a mess.'

Separately, OpenAI is emailing users that it will begin testing a combined Chat and Work experience in the coming weeks, starting with a small group. The merged interface is meant to let users move from exploring an idea to having ChatGPT carry it through in one place — bringing in files and plugins, building a website or presentation, or acting on the web — while Codex remains a separate experience in the desktop app. Brockman had said the company hoped to eliminate the Work tab by the end of the year.

The merge is also where the money changes: as part of the transition, OpenAI plans the shared ChatGPT-and-Codex usage allowance the Wire covered on October 31, replacing separate limits. OpenAI says most users won't need to wait for usage to reset more often than today, that usage will depend on model and task, and that Unlimited Instant chat is included in plans and won't draw from the allowance.

OpenAI announced on November 2 that it is raising its Security Bug Bounty rewards and planning another internal security sprint, this time with outside researchers from Cathedral Systems working alongside its own teams and using OpenAI's models to challenge its defences. Cathedral CEO Gavin Kliger said the collaboration pairs OpenAI's models and security expertise with Cathedral's research to find weaknesses, test fixes and support continuous defence. The sprint is planned, not completed — no start date or targets have been announced.

The money is concrete. A critical vulnerability in a core product such as ChatGPT, Codex or the API Platform now earns up to $30,000; exceptional critical findings remain eligible for up to $100,000 before bonuses, and new multipliers — up to 1.15x for report quality, 1.30x for priority campaigns and a 5–15% loyalty bonus — can lift an exceptional payout to about $172,000. OpenAI says the midpoint of its reward ranges for medium, high and critical findings has more than quadrupled on average.

The new ranges apply generously in transition: reports still awaiting an award will be paid at the new rates, and researchers whose bounties were awarded in the 30 days before the announcement will receive the difference where the new rates pay more. In its previous sprint OpenAI dedicated 25% of its product engineers to finding and fixing weaknesses, using Codex to reproduce findings and draft patches. Jailbreaks and prompt-only safety bypasses remain out of scope for the bounty.

Abu Dhabi signed four agreements with OpenAI on Monday, November 2, after Crown Prince Sheikh Khaled bin Mohamed bin Zayed met Sam Altman and witnessed the signing, the Abu Dhabi Media Office and the Emirates News Agency WAM reported. The deals span government services, energy, investment and education. No financial values or full implementation timetable were disclosed.

The headline initiative is "Machine-Readable Government," led by the Department of Government Enablement: selected government policies and regulations are converted into machine-readable form so AI can help officials with routine compliance checks, including licensing and certification. Its first pilot is already operational at the Abu Dhabi Agriculture and Food Safety Authority, on food imports, running on GPU infrastructure inside the UAE. Alongside it, ADNOC signed with OpenAI and G42's Inception42 — billed as the first energy company to deploy OpenAI's frontier technology — Mubadala signed to use AI for investment analysis and risk assessment, and Inception42 agreed a five-year partnership to spread OpenAI technology across UAE government, large companies and education.

Altman said Abu Dhabi and the UAE had set "an ambitious global benchmark for deploying AI across the public and private sectors." The agreements deepen a relationship that began with G42 in 2023 and produced the Stargate UAE computing cluster announced in May 2025, and they serve Abu Dhabi's stated goal of becoming the world's first fully AI-native government by 2027 — a goal, not a result: food imports are the only live use named so far.

Sunday, November 1 is Day 28 — the finale of Tibo Sottiaux's 28-day Codex challenge, in which OpenAI promised each day either a clear improvement for Codex and ChatGPT Work users or a full usage reset. Under Tibo's Day 26 post, the final two days were both to be banked resets, and the first is confirmed: Tibo himself posted 'Banked 1/2' at 00:43 UTC on November 1, and reset trackers record a banked credit issued at that time, after monitoring accounts first saw it land on October 31 at 19:59 UTC.

The second banked reset has now landed too. Tibo posted 'Banked 2/2' for Day 28, and TiboReset records the banked grant at 22:32 UTC on November 1, marking the challenge complete at 28 of 28. That closes the run that began on October 5.

A banked reset does not refill usage on its own: it sits on the account as a saved credit until you redeem it under Settings and Usage, and an unredeemed credit can expire. Check your own usage page for the credit rather than relying on tracker counts, which have disagreed on timings before.

A model OpenAI has never announced is turning up in its own usage accounting. Over the weekend of October 31 to November 1, several Codex users posted screenshots of their usage analytics listing a model called gpt-6.2-astra alongside GPT-6 Astra, the flagship OpenAI launched on September 3. TestingCatalog, reporting on November 2, found the new ID only on the October 31 bar of each breakdown, at shares that vary widely by account — 1.6% of one user's week, 19.8% of another's, and 37.7% of a single day for a third.

The model picker still says GPT-6 Astra, which points to quiet server-side routing — an A/B test or the start of a staged rollout — rather than a launch anyone chose. Watchlist account Token Gremlin (@TokenGremlin) shared a raw response event whose model field reads "gpt-6.2-astra" and called it official; that is strong evidence the ID is live on OpenAI's servers, but it is not an announcement. A separate review by VanData scored the Astra screenshots the strongest evidence of the weekend's leaks, while noting they cannot be traced to a full request.

Nothing official backs the name up. Checks on the morning of November 2 found gpt-6.2-astra in none of OpenAI's public places: not the API model catalog, not the API changelog (whose latest entry is gpt-6-rosalind on October 30), not the Codex changelog, and not the public models.json, which still lists five GPT-6 family slugs. Claims that 6.2 is more powerful, cheaper or faster are unverified. The context makes a successor plausible — OpenAI shelved GPT-6.1 Astra in late September after internal testing raised concerns, so a jump straight to 6.2 would fit a fixed, retrained model — but OpenAI has confirmed no name, price or date. This stays rumor, unresolved.

OpenAI has added card and device limits to ChatGPT, set out in a new Help Center page. If too many subscriptions are associated with the same payment card or device, ChatGPT may block a new subscription purchase at checkout. Separately, OpenAI now limits how many paid accounts you can use on one device: hit the cap and the account in front of you shows “Device limit reached” and cannot be used there.

The device limit can arrive late — the warning may appear at sign-in, or you may be signed out after a later check, even if the purchase went through and the account worked at first. The limits count ChatGPT Go, Plus and the Pro 100, Pro 200 and Pro 500 plans; Free accounts and Business, Enterprise and Edu workspaces do not count. Signing out of one account does not guarantee another becomes eligible, and buying credits or resetting usage will not clear a card or device restriction. OpenAI frames the limits as privacy and security protections and publishes no numbers for either cap.

The Decoder reads the change as steering users away from stacking several cheap subscriptions on one device toward buying extra credits or usage resets on a single account, which generally cost more — that commercial reading is The Decoder's; OpenAI's stated reason is security. The timing is practical either way: the limits land the same weekend OpenAI announced the shared ChatGPT-and-Codex allowance from December, and days after Codex made account switching easier on mobile.

OpenAI's chief executive spent the weekend in South Korea shoring up the memory supply his data-centre plans depend on. Sam Altman's visit was unannounced: on October 31 he addressed roughly 50 senior Samsung executives at the company's training centre in Yongin, in a speech titled 'The Next 10 Years Changed by AI, Corporate Choices,' and held separate discussions with SK Group chairman Chey Tae-won and executives from SK Hynix and SK Telecom. Samsung confirmed its meeting; SK Hynix told CNBC it could not confirm the lunch.

No new supply agreement came out of the trip. The meetings build on the October 2025 Stargate letters of intent under which Samsung and SK Hynix agreed to supply memory for OpenAI's infrastructure, including a production target equivalent to as many as 900,000 DRAM wafer starts per month — a target, not a binding order. What has changed since is bargaining power: Samsung and SK Hynix together control most of the world's high-bandwidth memory, Samsung has said its 2027 HBM supply is sold out, and SK Hynix has said production through 2029 is effectively accounted for.

The pressure behind the trip is cost as much as volume. Research firm TrendForce forecasts HBM's blended average price could rise 121% in 2027, and the visit landed in the same news cycle as reports that OpenAI has cut its current fundraising target from $30 billion to about $20 billion — a figure OpenAI has not confirmed, and which the Wire tracks separately as an unresolved rumor. Neither Samsung nor SK disclosed any new investment commitment or pricing terms from the weekend.

Day 27 of Tibo Sottiaux's 28-day Codex challenge was a banked reset, under his Day 26 promise that the final two days would be 'resets… banked'. Monitoring accounts first observed a new banked Codex reset landing at 19:59:29 UTC on Saturday, October 31 — 12:59 p.m. in Tibo's Pacific time — and Tibo himself has since confirmed the first of the pair, posting simply 'Banked 1/2' at 00:43 UTC on November 1. Reset trackers now record a banked credit issued at 00:43 UTC.

That post replaces this entry's original caveat: the landing is no longer only a monitor observation with no word from Tibo. What remains unverified is scope — the 'Banked 1/2' post does not specify eligible plans, and a banked reset works differently from the challenge's usual global resets in any case: it lands as a saved credit on the account and only takes effect when the user redeems it, so check your account rather than expecting usage to refill on its own.

One banked reset remains: Day 28, on Sunday, November 1, is the challenge finale. As of Sunday morning Eastern time the second credit had not been posted or verified, and the challenge trackers still showed Day 28 as waiting for Tibo.

OpenAI will pool the usage allowance for ChatGPT and Codex on its Plus, Pro and Business plans starting in December, according to its help-centre article 'Understanding ChatGPT and Codex usage limits', updated on October 31. Chat and coding work will draw on a single token-measured budget instead of the separate limits users have today, so heavy Codex use will leave less room for advanced-model chat, and the other way round.

The change is tied to OpenAI folding the agentic capabilities of ChatGPT Work into the main ChatGPT experience. Usage will be measured in tokens, with more advanced models and more complex tasks consuming more of the allowance. Instant chat — the fast default model — will not draw from the shared allowance at all.

OpenAI has given no exact December start date and no allowance sizes per plan. Users who reach the shared limit will have three options: wait for the reset, upgrade their plan, or buy credits to keep using eligible features. OpenAI says it expects most users will not need to wait for resets more often than they do now — a claim subscribers who split their time between chat and Codex will be able to test once the combined balance appears in Settings under Usage.

On November 1, BleepingComputer reported further detail from an email OpenAI sent to subscribers: the combined Chat and Work experience will first be tested with a small group of users in the coming weeks before it expands, and Codex will remain a separate experience in the ChatGPT desktop app. The same report notes OpenAI has already doubled Work and Codex allowances for its Pro 100, Pro 200 and Pro 500 subscriptions, effective October 29.

OpenAI's API pricing page now lists gpt-6-astra-law under "Legal model configurations" at $10.00 per million input tokens, $50.00 per million output tokens and $1.00 for cached input — the same price as GPT-6 Astra itself. TestingCatalog spotted the listing on October 31. The page says the promotional pricing is available at least through December 31, 2026.

Astra for Law is not a separately trained model. When OpenAI introduced it on September 17, it described a configuration that combines GPT-6 Astra with a legal search index and instructions for legal analysis and writing, offered first to selected law firms through Trusted Access in ChatGPT and Codex and "coming soon to the API." The pricing listing is the first public price for it, 44 days after that announcement, and the page names Harvey and Legora among the API customers able to build on it.

The same pricing page puts the life-sciences model gpt-6-rosalind at $15.00 input and $75.00 output per million tokens, with access limited to approved internal research through the trusted-access program, and the cyber model gpt-5.6-cyber at $12.50 input and $75.00 output, next to gpt-5.6-sol at $4.00 and $20.00.

Day 26 of Tibo Sottiaux's 28-day Codex challenge brought a feature instead of a reset. In a post timestamped October 31 at 05:42 UTC, Tibo wrote: "You can now easily switch between multiple accounts on mobile, and coming soon to desktop too." Account switching has been a long-standing request from developers who run separate personal and work Codex accounts.

The same post set expectations for the end of the challenge: "Next two days will be resets… banked… do with this what you may." Banked resets are saved to an account and only take effect when the user redeems one, rather than refilling usage automatically. The 28-day run — ship an improvement relevant to most Codex or ChatGPT Work users each day, or give everyone a full reset — ends on November 1.

There has been no global reset since October 28 at 06:29 UTC, and no separate Day 27 post had appeared by the time of this sweep on the morning of October 31. Reset trackers are treating the banked-reset promise as announced but not yet landed.

OpenAI published a safety report on October 30 for GPT-Rosalind-6, a new version of its life-sciences model for biology, drug discovery and translational medicine, and added it to the API changelog the same day. Access is tightly gated: GPT-6 Rosalind Research is available to approved research organisations through ChatGPT Work and Codex, API access needs a separate approval, and buying a subscription alone does not provide it. Applicants face a trusted-access review of their proposed research, security controls and governance, and in Enterprise workspaces the model starts with a two-week administrator preview, off by default.

The model uses the same underlying weights as GPT-6 Astra, with no additional training for this release. OpenAI says it refuses fewer legitimate biological questions that could also have harmful uses, while still refusing biological weaponisation. It is classified High capability in the biological and chemical domain and, relying on GPT-6 Astra's assessments, Critical in cybersecurity; none of its four Critical biological capability evaluations reached the relevant threshold.

On OpenAI's own benchmarks, at the highest reasoning budget tested, GPT-Rosalind-6 scored 49.6% on a medicinal-chemistry evaluation against 28.9% for GPT-Rosalind-5.5, 37.7% against 16.7% on genomics and quantitative biology, and 61.3% against 44.0% on an applied life-sciences benchmark built from tasks contributed by working scientists. OpenAI notes one biological-data benchmark used a configuration different from the production system, and the scores do not show the model can diagnose patients or deliver a successful medicine.

Pricing update, November 2: OpenAI's API pricing page, checked on November 1, lists gpt-6-rosalind at $15 per million input tokens, $1.50 cached and $75 output for prompts up to 272K input tokens — rising to $30, $3 and $112.50 above that — against GPT-6 Astra's $10 and $50. That is a 1.5x premium for, on OpenAI's own October 30 system-card addendum, the same Astra weights with no added training data and no additional post-training: what trusted-access customers are paying for is a looser refusal boundary on dual-use biology, paired with stricter cyber refusals. The Astra for Law configuration, by contrast, still carries no premium, at the standard $10 and $50.

A screenshot of what is described as an internal model-tracker bot, logged on October 28 and shared in X discussions on October 29-30, shows an entry named gpt-6.2-betelgeuse tagged INTERNAL. Commentator Chubby (@kimmonismus) posted 'GPT-6.2 bel incoming' alongside it, with the caveat that he could not confirm it. A compilation of the leaks counts several users posting similar tracker screenshots around October 30, though the provenance of the images is unverified and no authenticated API response sits behind them.

The name connects to the August Bel rumor already on the Wire: a reported pretraining run of more than 10 trillion parameters, said to be the base for whatever follows GPT-6. Other commentators argue a new pretrain would more likely ship as GPT-6.5 or GPT-7 than as a 6.2, and Wccftech's separate reading — that OpenAI's banked resets hint GPT-6.1 Astra lands next week — is speculation on top of a model OpenAI cancelled on September 28, not a reversal of that decision.

On November 1 a thread on r/singularity titled 'OpenAI is testing GPT-6.2 Astra' added another screenshot, with commenters debating whether it shows the same model as Betelgeuse or a version of Astra. A review by Kingy.ai on October 31 found no GPT-6.2 entry in OpenAI's model directory, model release notes or API changelog. OpenAI has not confirmed the name, capabilities, pricing or any release date — everything here remains rumor.