Daily Briefing: GPT-5.6 Launches, But the Government Decides Who Gets It

OpenAI launched GPT-5.6 Sol and Terra — Sol matching GPT-5.5 performance at the same price, Terra offering equivalent capability at half the cost — but both launched in government-requested limited preview rather than open access. CEO Sam Altman publicly confirmed the restriction came at the U.S. government's request, marking the first time an OpenAI model launch has been explicitly gated by government intervention from day one. This follows the Anthropic Mythos lockdown and NSA access disruptions, suggesting government control over frontier model deployment is becoming a pattern rather than an exception.

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OpenAI launches GPT-5.6 Sol and Terra with government-imposed limited preview, announces 750 tokens/sec for Sol in July ...