Trump administration asks OpenAI to limit release of its next model

The White House asked OpenAI to restrict the initial release of its GPT-5.6 model family, citing concern about its advanced capabilities, in what reporting described as the first known instance of the US government pre-emptively asking an American AI developer to limit a model launch before it happened, rather than acting after the fact. Officials reportedly compared the new models’ capabilities to Anthropic’s Mythos 5, the restricted cybersecurity-oriented model that had itself been pulled offline worldwide under a separate export-control order two weeks earlier.

OpenAI previewed the GPT-5.6 family the following day under the request’s terms, releasing three models — Sol, a flagship model, Terra for everyday work, and Luna, a cheaper variant — to a limited preview of roughly 20 government-vetted partner organisations, with a broader public release to follow after roughly twelve days. OpenAI framed its compliance as a response to Executive Order 14409, signed by Trump on 2 June, which had established a voluntary framework for giving government early access to frontier models before wider release; the company’s language pointed to the request as connected to that order rather than describing it as a legally binding directive. OpenAI said Sol outperformed Anthropic’s Mythos technology on the Terminal-Bench 2.1 benchmark, a claim from the company’s own announcement rather than independent testing.

The episode was the first practical use of the access framework the June executive order had created, applied to a model from a company other than the one whose product had just been forced offline under a harder export-control mechanism. It left ambiguous how “voluntary” such requests would prove in practice: a company facing a request framed as tied to a presidential order, days after a competitor’s models were pulled offline entirely, had limited room to decline. The restriction was lifted in early July, with reporting on the reversal noting a White House official disputed that any formal “permission” process had existed at all, saying release timing and scope “rest entirely with the companies.”