OpenAI advances AI capabilities in contracting with Ironclad collaboration

OpenAI has announced a research collaboration with Ironclad, a leader in AI contracting, to enhance AI agents' ability to handle complex professional tasks. The partnership focuses on training models to understand business rules, execute multi-step workflows, and verify outcomes. GPT-6 Astra, the first frontier model trained on Ironclad tasks, outperformed GPT-5.6 Sol, achieving a 32% higher score and a 48% lower time per attempt. Ironclad’s expertise helped define success metrics and integrate real customer needs into model development. The collaboration involved 11 tasks across legal, commercial, and procurement work, with each task evaluated against 8 to 50 criteria. Astra achieved an average score of 55.0%, compared to 41.6% for GPT-5.6 Sol, with an estimated time per attempt of 19.2 minutes versus 37.0 minutes. Ironclad provided hosted environments for model training and synthetic tasks for reinforcement learning. OpenAI invites other software companies to collaborate, offering a framework for evaluating model performance and addressing real-world challenges in contracting.