The US government has lifted restrictions on the public release of OpenAI’s GPT-5.6, clearing the way for the company to make its latest AI model broadly available after weeks of limited access under a government review process.
“GPT-5.6 Sol, along with Terra and Luna, will launch publicly this Thursday. We’re expanding preview access globally now,” the company announced in a post on X.
According to a report by Axios, the decision comes after additional testing and consultations between OpenAI and US officials over national security concerns.
The GPT-5.6 family consists of three models—the flagship GPT-5.6 Sol model, GPT-5.6 Terra as the mid-tier offering, and GPT-5.6 Luna as the lower-cost option.
The US government had initially ordered OpenAI to restrict GPT-5.6 only to a small group of government-approved partners while federal agencies evaluated the model’s capabilities and potential cybersecurity risks. The review was part of a broader effort to assess whether increasingly capable AI systems could be misused by foreign adversaries or exploited for offensive cyber operations before they reached the public.
“We don’t believe this kind of government access process should become the long-term default,” OpenAI had said in a statement when it was asked to halt GPT-5.6’s release in late June.
The AI giant is also reportedly considering giving a 5% stake in the company to the US government. According to the Financial Times, OpenAI chief Sam Altman believes such a move would help improve the industry’s relations with the Donald Trump administration
The Trump administration’s restrictions on frontier AI models come in light of unprecedented government oversight.
Anthropic’s Mythos 5 and Fable 5 models also faced temporary restrictions before some of those limits were eased. The company has also extended access to Claude Fable 5 for users on all paid plans until July 12.
The US government has been working with leading AI developers on a framework to evaluate frontier AI systems before their public release, balancing national security concerns with the need to maintain the competitiveness of US AI companies.
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