[DigitalToday intern reporter Seungah Yoo (유승아)] Betting on prediction markets is clustering around OpenAI’s next AI model Astra being unveiled within September, even though it has no official launch date.

On Aug. 18 (local time), blockchain media outlet Decrypto reported that prediction market Polymarket reflected a 59 percent chance Astra will launch by Sept. 15 and about a 72 percent chance by Sept. 30.

Astra is a model referred to internally at OpenAI as GPT-6, and no release schedule has been announced. Even so, short-term bets around its launch timing are forming quickly on Polymarket. The contract asking whether it will launch on Sept. 15 has traded about $27,600, while the Sept. 30 contract has traded about $35,600. Separately, in a market asking about the release timing by week, the Aug. 31 to Sept. 6 window recorded the highest probability at 39 percent.

This market mood contrasts sharply with OpenAI’s cautious stance earlier this month. OpenAI said on Aug. 7 it slowed Astra’s release pace, citing cybersecurity risks. In a preparedness disclosure, OpenAI said an internal evaluation found Astra showed "significant progress" in "agentic coding and cybersecurity." It added that it concluded it could not rule out cybersecurity capabilities at a "high" level under its own safety standards.

By OpenAI’s definition, a model in the high stage refers to one that can, without human help, find and create real, functional zero-day vulnerabilities targeting multiple hardened systems. OpenAI drew a line between Astra and a recent Hugging Face-related security incident, saying Astra "was not involved in exploiting Hugging Face." The explanation came as it weighs how to release a model that has not yet completed full safety verification.

Despite such warnings, market participants see the delay as unlikely to last long. Polymarket contracts are structured so outcomes are finalized only if OpenAI directly announces the schedule, but participants are still pricing in a high likelihood of an unveiling in the near term. In July, the implied probability that GPT-6 would be unveiled before Sept. 30 rose to about 78 percent, so this is not the first time such optimistic bets have emerged.

A separate prediction market, Myriad, operated by Dastan, the parent company of Decrypto, showed a somewhat different distribution. Participants in that market picked Sept. 30 as the most likely unveiling date for GPT-6, with the probability tallied at 31 percent. Sept. 15 stood at 19 percent, while Aug. 21, the earliest date, was at 5 percent but has been rising recently. Even on the same issue, perceived probabilities differ by platform.

Broader growth in prediction-market trading also supports this trend. Weekly trading volumes in prediction markets this year have grown to as much as $2 billion, and Polymarket’s lead has widened further. OpenAI’s new-model release schedule has become a recurring topic that repeatedly draws heavy trading on prediction markets. Still, the confirmed facts so far are that OpenAI has not yet disclosed an official release date and it has not fully resolved cybersecurity-related safety concerns raised in internal testing. Ultimately, the key question is how OpenAI will address this safety standards issue and when it will formalize Astra’s unveiling date.