Point Piper Trophy Home Market Fires Up With Second $85 Million-Plus Listing Deauville Point Piper Returns To Sydney’s Trophy Home Market

Point Piper’s tightly held trophy-home market is beginning to stir.

Only days after Radford in Point Piper arrived with an $85 million price guide, one of the peninsula’s best-known waterfront estates has returned to the market.

Set directly above Lady Martins Beach at 16 Longworth Avenue, Deauville occupies one of the rare positions where the boundary between private residence and Sydney Harbour feels almost indistinguishable.

The property’s north-easterly orientation opens it towards the harbour, with views stretching across the water towards Sydney Heads. More importantly, its beachfront setting offers direct access to the harbour from the lower reaches of the estate — an attribute that places it within Point Piper’s most tightly held category of homes.

Deauville has long been associated with the Mediterranean architecture of the French Riviera. Its pale exterior, deep terraces and arched openings give the house a distinctly European presence, while its progression down towards the water is characteristic of Sydney’s great harbour estates.

The residence was originally built around 1935 and has undergone extensive alterations during its long history. A major rebuilding program commissioned during the 2010s substantially reconsidered the four-level property, with approved plans including a new pool, larger garaging, landscaped grounds and a new boatshed.

Earlier plans also involved landscaping by celebrated garden designer Paul Bangay.

The result is a home in which its historic Mediterranean character is paired with the scale, amenity and infrastructure expected of a contemporary Point Piper residence.

At the centre of the property is a sequence of formal and informal living spaces oriented towards the harbour. The progression from the principal rooms to terraces, gardens and the waterfront gives Deauville the relaxed rhythm of a European coastal villa, despite its location only kilometres from Sydney’s CBD.

Accommodation is arranged across multiple levels, creating separation between private bedroom quarters, entertaining rooms and the lower waterfront spaces. The home’s elevation allows harbour views to remain present throughout much of the interior, while the lower level establishes a more direct connection with the beach and water.

The waterfront position is complemented by a swimming pool and boatshed, allowing the property to function as both a substantial family residence and a base for life on Sydney Harbour.

Lady Martins Beach is one of Point Piper’s most discreet stretches of shoreline. The Royal Prince Edward Yacht Club and Royal Motor Yacht Club are nearby, reinforcing the neighbourhood’s unusually close relationship with sailing and boating.

Deauville also carries a notable ownership and sales history.

The property sold for $13.5 million in 2012, when it was marketed as a five-bedroom Mediterranean-inspired home on approximately 800 square metres. It was subsequently acquired during a major rebuilding program by luxury-car importer and yachtsman Neville Crichton.

Contemporary reports placed that 2017 transaction at $39 million, although some coverage cited a value of approximately $45 million for the completed residence. Given the private nature of Point Piper transactions, both figures have appeared regularly in accounts of the sale.

That history places Deauville among a small group of Sydney homes whose value cannot be understood solely through bedroom numbers or land area. Direct waterfront access, orientation, harbour frontage and the scarcity of comparable properties carry far greater weight.

Point Piper contains only a few hundred homes and records remarkably little turnover. Cotality placed its median house value at more than $17 million in early 2026, although that figure tells only part of the story. Waterfront estates occupy a market of their own, with landmark sales reaching up to $130 million in recent years.

Fact box

Property: Deauville
Address: 16 Longworth Avenue, Point Piper, NSW
Position: Directly on Lady Martins Beach
Orientation: North-east
Land: Around 800 sqm
Residence: Multi-level Mediterranean-inspired waterfront home
Key features: Harbour views, swimming pool, landscaped grounds, boatshed, garaging and direct beach access
Previous sale: Reported at $39 million in 2017, with some contemporary reports citing approximately $45 million upon completion
Current campaign: Ken Jacobs, Forbes Global Properties
Price: $85m – $90m

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.