OpenAI Gets Green Light for GPT-5.6 After Government Review

OpenAI has received U.S. government approval to broadly release its new GPT-5.6 model family after an initial restricted rollout to vetted customers, the company said Monday. The clearance follows a multi-month review under the Biden administration's executive order on AI safety, which required pre-release testing of frontier models.

The restricted phase began in March, with GPT-5.6 available only to a small group of enterprise clients and federal contractors. That group included Microsoft's Azure government cloud and a handful of defense-adjacent research labs. The broader release lifts those access limits, letting any paying OpenAI customer use the model through the company's API and ChatGPT interface.

The review process covered the model's performance on a set of safety benchmarks, including its ability to generate disinformation, write malicious code, and evade content filters. OpenAI said it passed all thresholds the Commerce Department's AI Safety Institute set. The company did not release the specific benchmark scores.

GPT-5.6 is the first model to go through the full pre-release review framework the Biden administration established in the October 2023 executive order. That order required developers of frontier models to share safety test results with the government before a public launch. The Trump administration kept the framework in place, though it has signaled it may revise the rules.

The approval covers the full GPT-5.6 family, which includes a standard version, a faster