OpenAI unveils GPT-5.6 amid US AI regulatory drama

What happened

6 Sol is priced at $5 input / $30 output (nearly half the cost of Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5, which is $10 input / $50 output). Terra is half the cost of Sol, and Luna is less than half the cost of Terra.

OpenAI said the model suite should be generally available in the coming weeks because the company believes in “broad access,” and that the company cooperated with the US government ahead of this launch, but that it hopefully wouldn’t be the norm.

Why it matters

The company also debuted two additional modes for Sol: a “max” mode for deeper reasoning and an “ultra” mode for leveraging sub-agents — evoking OpenClaw, and perhaps a sign of OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger’s work at OpenAI so far.

” It also said that flagship model Sol “is better at helping people find and fix vulnerabilities than reliably carrying out end-to-end attacks,” and that Sol doesn’t cross the cyber-critical threshold under OpenAI’s preparedness framework — though it should be noted that OpenAI recently revised its preparedness framework in April and removed some areas of previous study.

The company said Sol has the company’s “most robust safety stack to date” and that it “strengthened protections for higher-risk activity, sensitive cyber requests, and repeated misuse.” OpenAI said it had dedicated “approximately 700,000 A100e GPU hours” to automated red-teaming and also worked with third-party testers, the latter of which will continue to test it for the next two weeks.

OpenAI also seemed to be taking an extra-sensitive approach during the preview period, which is being closely monitored by the Trump administration. The company wrote that “safeguards may occasionally intervene on legitimate work, particularly in dual-use areas where defensive and offensive activity can initially look similar. ” The report earlier this week said that the Trump administration will approve customers on a case-by-case basis during the preview period.

What to watch

“We don’t believe this kind of government access process should become the long-term default,” the company wrote. “It keeps the best tools from users, developers, enterprises, cyber defenders, and global partners who need them. ”

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