OpenAI cleared to launch GPT-5.6 Sol Terra Luna publicly Thursday after Commerce Department review
ChatGPT users get GPT-5.6 on Thursday. The Trump administration cleared OpenAI to publicly release the Sol, Terra and Luna models after a Commerce Department security review of their cybersecurity capabilities, Axios reports. Access had been limited to government-vetted partners.
OpenAI will launch its GPT-5.6 model family to the public on Thursday, after the Trump administration approved a broad rollout and ended weeks of restricted access, Axios reports. The release had been limited to a small group of government-vetted partners at the request of the US government, which raised cybersecurity concerns. The Commerce Department's Center for AI Standards and Innovation carried out the evaluation, and OpenAI sent technical staff to Washington to answer the agency's questions. Federal scrutiny focused on capabilities the company itself has promoted: the flagship model's strength in coding, biology and cybersecurity, including the potential to discover vulnerabilities in software. GPT-5.6 comes in three tiers. Sol is the flagship. Terra is a lower-cost option aimed at enterprise workloads. Luna is the fastest and least expensive, built for high-volume tasks. The clearance matters beyond OpenAI: a federal security evaluation stood between a frontier model and its public release, and the developers and enterprises that build on OpenAI's models had their access gated by that process for weeks. Source: Axios, with additional reporting by Engadget and The Hill.