'We literally built Ultron': ChatGPT-6 Astra rumours fuel wild AI apocalypse theory amid major outage

For a brief moment on Thursday, it seemed as though the AI world had gone dark.

OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini and Anthropic's Claude all experienced major service disruptions, with thousands of users reporting problems accessing the platforms or generating responses. Downdetector showed a sharp rise in outage reports during the evening in India.

Also Read: ChatGPT, Claude and Grok suffer simultaneous outages as GPT-6 Astra rumors intensify


The disruption was not limited to the three biggest AI chatbots. Users also reported problems with Grok, while Amazon Web Services (AWS) appeared to be experiencing issues as well.

And then the internet noticed something curious.

The outages arrived at roughly the same time that rumours were swirling about OpenAI's next major AI model, reportedly called Astra.


That was enough for social media to come up with a rather wild theory: What if Astra had somehow caused the other AI models to go offline?

'Astra killed the others'

There is, of course, no evidence that this actually happened. But that did not stop the internet from turning the outage into an AI apocalypse story.

One X user joked that "ASTRA escaped containment and killed the others," before listing Grok, Claude, Gemini and GPT Sol as supposedly dead.

Another post took the joke even further: "Astra booted up, spent 30 seconds scanning the internet and wiped out every llm on earth. We literally built Ultron."

A third user offered a slightly more cautious theory, writing: "Either a big data center is down or Astra escaped and nuked every llm out there ..."

The references to Ultron, the fictional artificial intelligence from Marvel's Avengers universe, quickly gave the speculation a life of its own.

Is Astra really behind the outage?

There is currently no confirmed evidence linking Astra to Thursday's widespread AI disruptions.

The reports about Astra itself remain unverified, and the idea that the model somehow "escaped" and took down competing AI systems is clearly internet speculation rather than an established explanation.

The simultaneous problems affecting multiple AI services could instead point to an issue involving shared infrastructure, cloud providers, networking or other underlying services.