At the request of the U.S. government, OpenAI will initially make its new GPT-5.6 model available only to select partners, with access approved on a "customer by customer" basis. CEO Sam Altman says this isn't a "preferred long term model." After the forced takedown of Anthropic's Fable, AI labs are afraid of a de facto licensing regime for AI models.

The government will approve customer access on a case-by-case basis.

This marks the first time the U.S. government has preemptively asked a U.S. AI company to restrict the launch of a model before release.