The Trump administration approved a wide release of GPT-5.6 following additional testing by the Commerce Department's AI standards body
Photo by Tomohiro Ohsumi / Getty Images
OpenAI will launch its GPT-5.6 model family to the public on Thursday after the Trump administration approved a broad rollout, according to Axios, ending weeks of restricted access that had limited the models to a small group of government-vetted partners.
The approval followed a period of additional testing and direct engagement with government officials. The Commerce Department's Center for AI Standards and Innovation carried out the evaluation, and OpenAI dispatched technical staff to Washington to respond to the agency's inquiries, according to Axios.
GPT-5.6 is a family of three models. Sol is the flagship tier, Terra is a lower-cost option aimed at enterprise workloads, and Luna is the fastest and least expensive of the three, designed for high-volume tasks. Sol's strengths in coding, biology, and cybersecurity were among the factors that drew federal scrutiny in the first place, according to The Next Web — capabilities OpenAI has publicly touted but that regulators wanted to examine before permitting a broad launch.
A request from the Trump administration last month had kept the model out of general circulation, confining it to roughly 20 partners whose identities had been individually cleared by federal officials. At the time, CEO Sam Altman told employees internally that access was being granted on a case-by-case basis and that OpenAI did not view the arrangement as a sustainable approach going forward. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick met with Altman to discuss GPT-5.6, with his goal being to verify that agencies across the government had reviewed the model and signed off on it.
That restricted rollout fit within — but also exceeded — a broader oversight structure President Trump put in place on June 2, which called for voluntary pre-release checks on the most powerful AI systems. Where that framework stopped at voluntary participation, the GPT-5.6 situation escalated into a state-curated access list, a concession OpenAI made only after federal officials pressed it to delay.
Anthropic's recent experience with federal intervention offers a parallel: A Commerce Department export control order in June compelled the company to pull both Fable 5 and Mythos 5 from general availability amid national security concerns. Fable 5 has since been reinstated, but Mythos 5 is still restricted to a narrow set of American organizations.
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