OpenAI believes it can achieve artificial general intelligence in 2026, according to an interview with TIME Magazine. Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman said the company has not reached AGI yet, but expects to have an internal version of it soon enough. Asked where OpenAI stands, Altman said the organization is "not quite yet" there.

Chief Research Officer Mark Chen put a number on the remaining gap, saying OpenAI is "80% of the way" toward AGI. Co-founder Greg Brockman went further, suggesting that people may later look back on this stretch as the point when AGI first showed up.

The TIME piece is the product of nearly three weeks of interviews with more than two dozen people connected to the company, from OpenAI's executives and employees to its investors and competitors. OpenAI's confidence is grounded in its new line of models, named Astra.

OpenAI introduced Astra last year as a system designed to mimic an automatic research assistant. Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki claims that goal has already been achieved. He said that one could give Astra an experiment to conduct: it will generate the required code within OpenAI's software environment, carry out the experiment, and come back with the results. Pachocki added that Astra can take a research paper and complete the task within a week's time. Those capabilities matter because research work is one of the areas often cited in AGI debates as a test of whether a system can do more than answer prompts and can instead complete multi-step work with less human direction.

Astra points toward longer autonomous research and self-improving AI systems

Astra can also support what OpenAI calls persistent agents. These are digital workers capable of staying on an assignment for longer periods without constant human input. Altman believes the bigger test will be whether Astra can create useful knowledge instead of only reorganizing existing material.

During a customer preview, he said, "I expect this will be the first model where the model actually invents new things in a way that matters." He added, "That's a very AGI-like thing."

That notion leads to a broader gamble. If an AI system is capable of conducting research, it could be used to create a superior AI system, setting off a feedback loop in which new systems are used to build more advanced systems. Some say autonomous AI research is still much further away, while others argue that early parts of the process are already appearing. For OpenAI, that makes Astra more than a product milestone: it is part of the company's case that increasingly autonomous systems may change how AI systems are developed.

A related debate concerns whether systems constructed predominantly on language models can generate novel discoveries and generalize their knowledge across a wide range of tasks, a skill that many scientists consider vital for AGI.

At the same time, the term "AGI" itself remains rather vague. OpenAI defines AGI as "highly autonomous systems that surpass human performance on most economically relevant tasks." Other scientists, however, apply a more liberal criterion of AGI.