Traders push GPT-6 bets into the autumn after OpenAI names Astra
Published: 06:10 04 Aug 2026 EDT
Prediction market traders have all but abandoned the idea that OpenAI will release GPT-6 this month, shifting their money instead towards a launch late in the year.
Contracts on Polymarket, where users bet real money on future events, now price the chance of a public GPT-6 release by 7 August at under 1%.
The odds for 21 August have fallen 35% to 14%, and those for 31 August are down 42% to 21%. Money has moved out along the calendar rather than out of the market altogether.
The probability of a release by 30 September has risen 12% to 62%, while 31 December is up 39% to 90%. Nearly $915,000 has been staked across the market.
The repricing follows OpenAI's announcement on 1 August that its next major model family will be called Astra.
The company introduced it not with a product launch but with a research report claiming an internal version had resolved ten open problems in mathematics and theoretical computer science.
Those included disproving Connes's rigidity conjecture, proving Ehrhart's volume conjecture, and delivering the first improvement to the general upper bound on sphere-packing density since 1978.
Each proof shipped with a certificate in Lean, a language that forces every logical step to be machine-checkable.
OpenAI put the total compute cost of the ten solutions at roughly $2,000. What it did not provide was a release date, pricing, a model card or any indication of whether Astra will ship as GPT-6, as another point release in the GPT-5 family, or as a separate line entirely.
The market rules are strict on that distinction. Anything branded GPT-5.5 or similar does not count, and closed or private access will not resolve the contracts.
OpenAI has released seven GPT-5 variants in under a year, most recently GPT-5.6 on 9 July, without ever reaching the generational number traders are waiting for.
