OpenAI staggers GPT-5.6 rollout for government vetting, eyes 2027 IPO
OpenAI Group PBC will roll out its next model, GPT-5.6, to a small group of partners rather than the public at the request of the Trump administration, the latest sign that Washington now wants to review frontier artificial intelligence models before they ship widely.
The plan was disclosed by Chief Executive Sam Altman during a staff question-and-answer session on Wednesday, as detailed in a report from The Information. Altman reportedly told employees the federal government had asked the company to take the staggered approach and that it was the fastest path to a broad release. In a memo, he said the government would be “approving access customer by customer during this preview period,” according to the report, adding that he hoped a wider rollout would follow “a couple of weeks later” if the preview went well.
The arrangement mirrors how rival Anthropic PBC handled Mythos, a model with advanced cybersecurity capabilities that it shared with select partners in April rather than releasing it publicly. The Trump administration later forced Anthropic to pull Mythos and a companion model offline earlier this month under an emergency export control directive citing national security, a confrontation that appears to have set the template for how the government now approaches cutting-edge releases.
