OpenAI will initially release its next AI model, GPT-5.6, to a limited set of government-approved partners rather than the general public, after the Trump administration asked the company to stagger the rollout.
Two White House offices — the Office of the National Cyber Director and the Office of Science and Technology Policy — were behind the request. The government wants to test and evaluate the security of new models before a wider release. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman discussed the plans for the limited rollout in a memo to employees. Among the launch details shared with employees: access will be rolled out to 20 partners, with Amazon $AMZN's Bedrock software platform serving as one route in, Bloomberg reported.
In the memo, Sam Altman said the government is approving access "customer by customer." "We've made clear to the U.S. government that this is not our preferred long term model, and will work with them and others in industry to achieve a more sustainable approach for future releases," Altman said in the memo. Altman said he hopes to release GPT-5.6 to the public a "couple of weeks later."
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick met with Sam Altman on Wednesday to discuss GPT-5.6, according to Axios. His goal, a source said, was to verify that agencies across the government had gone through the model and signed off on it. A source said the government intervened because GPT-5.6 has capabilities similar to Mythos 5, Anthropic's model that was recently pulled from the market.
The move follows a turbulent period for the AI industry rooted in the government's handling of Anthropic's models. Under a Commerce Department directive, Anthropic was required to cut off foreign nationals from Mythos 5 and Fable 5 — its two most capable models — after officials grew alarmed over a potential jailbreak vulnerability that researchers had identified. Because restricting access by nationality proved technically unworkable, Anthropic ultimately had to shut the models down entirely for all users — a consequence of the order's roughly 90-minute notice window.
OpenAI and the administration view GPT-5.6 as on par with Mythos 5 in capability. An executive order Trump signed earlier this month called on agencies to create a voluntary pre-release review process for advanced AI models, though CNN reported that the accompanying regulatory framework remains unfinished. With no formal structure yet in place, each company has been improvising its own approach to keeping officials informed ahead of major launches.
A White House official said the administration continues "to collaborate with frontier AI labs to develop shared approaches for addressing the challenges of scaling this technology."