OpenAI's GPT-5.6 launches Thursday after a delay forced by the U.S. government

Jul 8, 2026

OpenAI's GPT-5.6 models ship Thursday. Unveiled in late June, they were initially restricted to select partners under U.S. government pressure. The Department of Commerce approved the public launch after the Center for AI Standards and Innovation ran additional tests, Axios reported. OpenAI openly criticized the hold, saying it kept the best tools away from developers and companies. Binding standards for releasing such models, as called for in Trump's latest AI executive order, still don't exist.

GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra took the top spot in the TerminalBench 2.1 coding benchmark with 91.9 percent. Claude Mythos 5 hit 88.0 percent, while Google's Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview trailed the field at 70.7 percent. | Image: OpenAI

OpenAI says Sol beats Anthropic's Claude Mythos 5 on several benchmarks. On TerminalBench 2.1, Sol scored 88.8 percent, Sol Ultra hit 91.9 percent, and Mythos 5 landed at 88 percent. On cybersecurity tasks, Sol matched Mythos 5 but used only a third of the tokens. Sol costs $5/$30 per million input/output tokens. Anthropic's Fable 5 runs nearly double at $10/$50 and likely burns through more tokens too.

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