Speaking with CNBC Thursday (July 9), Sam Altman described the AI startup’s work with the government as a “collaborative back and forth,” where the government would conduct tests and surface problems for the company to address.
“If you want broad access, which we do, and you have powerful models, you really want to be able to be confident in your safety claims, because otherwise the world is going to get uncomfortable very fast,” Altman said.
The new model, GPT-5.6 Sol, is 54% more token efficient on agentic coding jobs, and is “as good or better” than competing models on the market, Altman told CNBC.
“Every enterprise now is thinking about spend and the value they’re getting in exchange for AI, and this is what we really want to do,” he added.
GPT-5.6 Sol is joined by two other models, Terra and Luna, which the company announced in June. Altman said OpenAI confined the initial launch to a “small group of trusted partners” at the government’s request.
The company has described Sol as a flagship model that is its strongest yet when it comes to agentic capabilities in coding, biology and cybersecurity. Terra is a balanced model for everyday work that functions similarly to GPT-5.5 at half the cost. The company called Luna a fast and affordable model that offers strong capability at the lowest cost OpenAI offers.
As covered here earlier this week, OpenAI had not initially planned to limit access to the general-use model but hit pause on the rollout at the Trump administration’s request and in consultation with the Office of Science and Technology Policy and the Office of the National Cyber Director.
Rival AI startup Anthropic said at the end of June that it would start to restore access to its Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 after the federal government lifted export controls on the models.
Anthropic had debuted Fable 5 and Mythos 5 on June 9, saying it had built in safeguards to prevent them from being misused. However, the company announced days later that it had disabled access to the models following a government export control directive that cited unspecified “national security authorities.”
