OpenAI is reportedly releasing GPT-5.6 only as a limited preview to a small group of partners. Via The Information
The reason, according to Sam Altman: the U.S. government asked it to.
Altman reportedly told staff that the government will be "approving access customer by customer" during the preview period, with a broader release potentially following a couple of weeks later.
This comes obvously after Anthropic took a similar path with Mythos, and after the White House forced Anthropic to withdraw Fable and Mythos over national security concerns.
However: Actually Trump’s AI executive order explicitly says the new model review process is supposed to be voluntary, not a government licensing or preclearance regime.
But in practice, frontier AI launches are starting to look very different.
NEW @WIRED: Trump admin has been happier talking to Anthropic lately as the company tries to get its most powerful AI models back online
— Admin has had multiple calls with Anthropic in recent days, encouraged that CEO Dario Amodei has been swapped out
— Talks have instead been led by Anthropic cofounder Tom Brown and public policy chief Sarah Heck
— “Tom Brown is not being a weirdo like Dario and can actually engage,” said one person directly familiar with the calls
🚨 JD VANCE: “I really worry about with AI is surveillance… AI is fundamentally a communist technology. It allows governments and corporations to surveil people in very profound and different ways. And that scares me a lot…”