Three model names that OpenAI hasn't announced, aurora-red-alpha, aurora-green-alpha and aurora-blue-alpha, are being reported as visible in the company's API. The reports come from people outside OpenAI, and we haven't been able to confirm them ourselves.
Who reported it
The X account Lisan al Gaib (@scaling01) posted at 10:59 Beijing time on October 18: "these just appeared in the OpenAI API," followed by the three names. Andrew Curran (@AndrewCurran_), who writes about AI, posted at 11:13: "Three mysterious new models just showed up in the OpenAI API." Neither post includes a screenshot or says how the names were found.
They weren't the first to flag them. At 10:49, an automated X account called GPTBot posted each of the three names under the line "New model on OpenAI," and a screenshot shared by another user shows a matching alert from the Dev Mode Discord's model tracker at about the same time. These are third-party monitoring tools, not OpenAI.
What OpenAI has said
Nothing so far. As of 11:36 Beijing time, none of the three IDs appears on OpenAI's API models page, changelog or pricing page, and neither OpenAI's official accounts nor Tibo Sottiaux of OpenAI have posted about them. We can't query OpenAI's model list ourselves, so we can't say whether the IDs are really there, whether anyone can call them, or what they are.
Outside speculation, including in scaling01's own post, ranges from specialized Codex coding models to faster versions of existing models, but none of it is backed by anything OpenAI has published.
Our view
Test IDs showing up in an API don't mean a launch is close. Companies can register models for internal or limited testing long before, or instead of, a public release. And three names that differ only by a color could just as easily be variants of a single model being compared as three separate products.
We'll update this article when OpenAI says something.