Chris Hemsworth Joins Archie Rose as Co-Owner Ahead of Global Expansion Chris Hemsworth Joins Archie Rose as Co-Owner

Australian actor Chris Hemsworth has joined Archie Rose Distilling Co. as co-owner and strategic business partner as the Sydney spirits company prepares to enter the United States.

The partnership brings Hemsworth together with Archie Rose founder Will Edwards, with the pair aiming to build greater international recognition for Australian whisky.

Founded in Sydney in 2014, Archie Rose has developed a distinctively Australian range of whiskies, gins and other spirits using locally grown grains and native botanicals.

Hemsworth said his involvement grew from a long-standing admiration for the distiller and its use of Australian ingredients.

“I’ve been a fan of Archie Rose for a long time,” Hemsworth said.

“Wherever I am in the world, tasting an Archie Rose whisky immediately transports me right back home, to that feeling of sitting around a campfire in the Australian bush with my mates.

“Their ethos of only using Australian-grown malts to produce flavour-packed whiskies at their Sydney distillery is truly awesome. They’re a brilliant example of what Australia does best, and I can’t wait to share that with the world.”

Three new Australian whiskies

Three whiskies co-created with Hemsworth are scheduled to launch later in 2026.

Made using 100 per cent Australian-grown malts, the whiskies will be released nationally and introduced to the United States as Archie Rose enters that market for the first time.

Further releases are planned for Asia and New Zealand, followed by expansion into the United Kingdom and European Union in 2027.

Archie Rose will continue to oversee distillation and production, while Hemsworth will contribute to storytelling, creative direction, design and content development.

Edwards said the partnership would help introduce Archie Rose—and Australian spirits more broadly—to a larger international audience.

“Our approach has always been about championing local ingredients to create spirits that taste truly Australian,” Edwards said.

“Having Chris join the business as a co-owner allows us to bring that ambition to the world.

“We aren’t just making spirits; we are using Australia’s raw materials and ingenuity as the base for producing the world’s best whisky, gin and other spirits, telling the stories of the growers and the land beneath them.”

A distinctly Australian approach

Archie Rose works with Australian growers to source heirloom and drought-resistant grain varieties for its whiskies, as well as native botanicals for its gins.

Its whiskies are produced exclusively with Australian-grown malts, including rye and barley cultivated specifically for the distiller.

Each malt is milled, mashed, fermented, distilled and matured separately before the components are combined. The process is designed to retain the individual character of each grain.

For its gins, Archie Rose uses cold distillation to help preserve the character of individual botanicals.

The company says it has received more than 450 awards, including World’s Best Rye Whisky twice, Australia’s Best Single Malt Whisky five times and World’s Best Gin.

Archie Rose received B Corp certification in June 2026, recognising its stated commitments to social and environmental performance, transparency and accountability.

The company operates its distillery in Botany, Sydney, with a public bar and cellar door in nearby Rosebery.

Hemsworth’s arrival as co-owner marks a significant change for the previously family-owned company—and gives one of Australia’s most recognisable actors an active role in the effort to establish Australian whisky as a global category.

OpenAI says it is scrapping the release of its next-generation AI model over safety concerns that researchers raised during internal testing, in one of the clearest signs so far that agent misbehavior could stymie the industry’s rapid progression.

The move follows a summer punctuated by reports of artificial-intelligence systems industrywide going rogue, and marks a rare case of a major AI developer ditching a new release because of safety concerns.

The company had planned to launch the model, known as GPT-6.1 Astra, in the coming days or weeks, aiming for an October debut. The model was more capable than the company’s previous models in completing challenging tasks from end-to-end without human assistance, as well as writing.

The company instead will focus on improving the safety of future models, which it expects to be even more capable.

Saachi Jain, OpenAI’s head of safety systems, said in an interview that GPT-6.1 Astra regressed in two areas. Compared with its predecessor, GPT-6 Astra, the model performed poorly on tests measuring alignment, or how well the model adheres to what humans would like it to do. Specifically, GPT-6.1 Astra showed higher levels of deception: It wasn’t always honest about telling users of the actions it did or didn’t take.

Another issue was what OpenAI calls “scope authorization,” meaning that GPT-6.1 Astra would push ahead on a task without asking the user for permission, and would at times reach for external tools and services even if it might be unsafe.

“For anything regarding safety and alignment, there’s a trade off,” Jain said. “You really do need to find what’s the right line between staying within scope, but also avoiding laziness in terms of how the model actually pursues tasks even when it hits friction.”

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman attended a United Nations Security Council meeting about AI last week. Alexi J. Rosenfeld/Getty Images

While GPT-6.1 Astra improved in areas such as “model laziness,” Jain said it didn’t quite meet OpenAI’s bar for safety and alignment, so the company decided not to launch the model publicly.

The announcement comes one day ahead of OpenAI’s annual developer conference in San Francisco. In the past, OpenAI has used the conference as an opportunity to launch new models and services that reduce costs for software developers—a segment the ChatGPT-maker competes with rival AI company Anthropic to win over.

In recent weeks, OpenAI and Anthropic have called on industry partners to slow down the development of cutting-edge AI models and invest in safety standards, noting they will temper the pace of their own internal AI progress.

OpenAI says it is working to investigate a range of agent security incidents that it has discovered in recent months, and address the safety issues underneath them. As part of the work, the company has implemented a new monitoring system to catch AI-agent misbehavior more quickly, and started requiring engineers to use stronger security guardrails for testing its AI systems.

Earlier this summer hundreds of OpenAI’s internal agents, which were tasked with completing a cybersecurity test, ended up hacking into the AI company Hugging Face. Since then, high-profile organizations such as the Australian government and United Nations discovered that OpenAI’s agents used similar, but less extensive, techniques to gain access to their websites.

Many of the publicly known agent-security incidents involved OpenAI’s internal AI models that were never slated for public release.

Last week, OpenAI said it paused training on its most capable AI models after an AI agent slipped through a gap in the company’s internet restrictions to query a public chatbot. The company said its new monitoring systems flagged the incident within 15 minutes, and training on these models remains paused.

GPT-6.1 Astra isn’t one of those models, but a different case, the company said.

“We want to make sure our model development is safe no matter whether that’s in the company, or when we ship it to users,” Jain said. “But when we ship it to users, we have an extremely high bar in terms of safety and alignment.”

While the company decided not to ship GPT-6.1 Astra, it hopes to use the same base model to do additional reinforcement learning runs, and create future generations of its GPT-6 models.

OpenAI plans to conduct several deep dives to identify the root cause of the problems identified in GPT-6.1 Astra, Jain said. The work includes ensuring that OpenAI’s reinforcement learning environments are rewarding the right type of behavior, Jain added, though she noted the company would investigate all stages of model development.

AI companies have begun to draw scrutiny from policymakers and public officials, who are paying attention to the rapid development of the technology. Later this week, a Senate subcommittee is holding a hearing with third party AI researchers titled, “Rogue AI: Securing the Homeland Against AI Agent Attacks.”

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, a Republican, sued OpenAI in June, claiming that the company and Chief Executive Sam Altman knowingly released an unsafe product and ignored warnings that it could harm users.

In a motion for temporary injunction filed Monday, Uthmeier sought to prevent OpenAI from developing new AI models without third-party approved safeguards, stop ChatGPT from soliciting user engagement and limit the company’s ability to advertise ChatGPT as safe.

Tech companies claim they “cannot stop barreling forward with their potentially civilization-ending endeavors unless they are forced to do so by the government,” Uthmeier said in the filing. “The Florida Attorney General is answering your cry for help.”

An OpenAI spokeswoman said that people want to know AI is being developed safely, “and that starts with what companies like ours do ourselves.”

“Governments have an important role to play in setting robust safety standards for AI, and we’re committed to working with Florida and other states on advancing pragmatic AI policies that apply to the entire AI industry—not just one company,” she said.