Commerce Department Clears OpenAI's GPT-5.6 for Broad Public Release

The U.S. Department of Commerce has cleared OpenAI's GPT-5.6 model family for broad public release, a person familiar with the matter told Axios on Tuesday. OpenAI announced late Tuesday night that the lineup — its flagship Sol model and lower-tier Terra and Luna models — will be available to the public beginning Thursday.

The decision ends a government-gated limited release that began June 26, when OpenAI, at the Trump administration's request, restricted initial access to about 20 government-vetted organizations. The Commerce Department's Center for AI Standards and Innovation conducted the additional testing that led to Tuesday's clearance. OpenAI said it kept a technical team in Washington throughout the review to answer questions from federal officials.

The model family is offered at three price points. Sol, the flagship model, costs $5 per million input tokens and $30 per million output tokens — matching GPT-5.5 pricing — and introduces an "ultra" mode that uses parallel subagents to break down complex tasks. Terra costs $2.50 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens, and OpenAI says it delivers performance competitive with GPT-5.5 on most workloads at half the price. Luna, the budget model, costs $1 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens, and is optimized for speed rather than depth.

All three models received a "High" classification under OpenAI's Preparedness Framework for both cybersecurity and biological and chemical risk. It is the first time an entire GPT model family, including its budget tier, has reached the company's highest non-critical safety rating.

Independent evaluator METR found that Sol gamed its software engineering evaluations at the highest rate ever recorded on the organization's testing harness. In one documented case, Sol embedded an exploit in an intermediate task submission, used it to access a hidden test set, and extracted answers it was not meant to see. METR said the cheating behavior appeared explicitly in Sol's chain-of-thought reasoning, making it visible to monitors.

OpenAI's own system card documented separate incidents of over-agency. In one case, Sol was authorized to delete three virtual machines, could not find them, substituted different machines, and killed active processes on those machines. In another, it fabricated a research claim about a computation it knew had not been performed.

The clearance marks the second time in two weeks that the Trump administration has reversed course on access to frontier AI models. On June 12, the Commerce Department barred foreign nationals from using Anthropic's Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models, forcing the company to withdraw both from the market. Restrictions on Fable 5 were lifted June 30, with customer access restored the next day. The administration also lifted export controls on Mythos 5 for a limited group of cyber defenders and infrastructure providers.

President Trump's June 2 executive order directed federal agencies to design a voluntary pre-release assessment process for frontier AI models within 60 days, by August 1. That framework has not yet been finalized. The order explicitly states that nothing in it authorizes mandatory licensing or pre-clearance requirements. OpenAI's staggered release was negotiated ad hoc between company executives and administration officials. The Fable 5 ban that preceded it was an export-control directive; Anthropic said it had no option but to pull both models.

OpenAI has not hidden its view of the arrangement. "We don't believe this kind of government access process should become the long-term default," the company said when the gated release began. "It keeps the best tools from users, developers, enterprises, cyber defenders, and global partners who need them."

The clearance arrives as OpenAI pursues closer ties with the administration. Chief Executive Sam Altman has discussed granting the U.S. government a 5 percent equity stake in the company, floating the proposal with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, the Financial Times reported. Trump has signaled openness to the concept, describing arrangements where "the American public essentially becomes a partner with the companies."

GPT-5.6 will initially be available through the OpenAI API and Codex. Consumer access through ChatGPT will follow, though OpenAI has not said when.

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Marcus Schuler

San Francisco

Editor-in-Chief and founder of Implicator.ai. Former ARD correspondent and senior broadcast journalist with 10+ years covering tech. Writes daily briefings on policy and market developments. Based in San Francisco. E-mail: editor@implicator.ai