Even the $200 Pro subscription has now been paused, so a broader GPT-6 Astra rollout in ChatGPT Chat feels even less likely anytime soon. At first, Astra was astonishing. “Generational leap.” “A milestone marking the arrival of the AGI era.” The praise was enormous, and so were the expectations. Then, after only a few days, OpenAI quietly began weakening Astra’s intelligence, and the actual experience took a major hit. I always expected something like this to happen eventually. I just did not expect it to happen this fast. Worse, some users are being silently routed to weaker models. They pay exactly the same subscription price, yet invisible rules and algorithms effectively turn them into second class users. Now OpenAI is telling us compute is constrained and demand is overwhelming its infrastructure, to the point that even its highest tier subscription plan has been paused, with a promise to fix things as soon as possible. So this is where we are now: > Some users are silently downgraded > Some users are routed to weaker models > The highest paid subscription tier has been paused And even after all of that, they are only barely keeping up with demand. We went from an astonishing Astra launch to degradation, limits, overload, and paused subscriptions in a matter of days. Frontier intelligence has never truly been available to everyone. It wasn’t before. It still isn’t.