OpenAI has announced the general release of GPT-5.6 tomorrow. (Picture: OpenAI)GPT-5.6 was officially unveiled a little over a week ago, but got hampered by a US government intervention for cyber risks and national security, having been shown in benchmarks to beat Anthropic’s Mythos.
At launch, it got released only to some 20 «trusted partners,» and OpenAI promised a general release «in the coming weeks.»
Now those weeks have passed, the government has lifted its restrictions without further explanation, and both OpenAI’s X account and CEO Sam Altman are posting that it will «launch publicly this Thursday.»
This comes after extensive testing by the Center for AI Standards and Innovation within the Department of Commerce, aided by experts from OpenAI, who stayed on call for «potential questions,» Axios reports.
No account has been given as to what specifically caused the delayed launch or what conditions the government had for its release.
A sample from Muse Image, Alexandr Wang as a plushie. (Picture: Meta)Muse Image catapulted directly to the second place on Arena.ai’s leaderboard in the categories for Text-to-Image and Image Edit, ahead of Nano Banana 2 and just behind GPT-Image-2.
It’s the first image generator from the Superintelligence Lab and pairs with Muse Spark to reason, search the web, and plan before it generates an image.
Meta also says it knows you from your Facebook and Instagram feeds, giving it a layer of contextual awareness, and it lets you tag any Instagram account for inclusion in your images.
The latter is automatically enabled, meaning anyone on Meta.ai can tag your Instagram content in AI generations, unless you explicitly opt out.
Cowork is moving to the cloud, where it can be accessed from everywhere. (Picture: Anthropic)Anthropic is freeing Cowork from the computer, transferring relevant files, emails and notes to continue your tasks in the cloud long after you’ve left the home/office.
That means you can now set up Cowork on your computer, close it, and have projects run independently, sending updates and confirmation requests to your phone or the web.
While releasing this update, Anthropic is also revealing a few usage stats for the app. It turns out, it is hardly used for coding or software design at all.
Rather, 90% of usage is knowledge work and business operations; things like drafting memos and reports from raw data, or turning a contacts list or transcripts into sales leads.
These are routine tasks that involve a lot of data parsing or housekeeping that are essential parts of office work, but is rarely advertised. Anthropic calls it «work around the work.»
The new features should be available on claude.ai and in the sidebar of the iOS or Android apps, rolling out «over the next several weeks» for Max users, with «more plans to follow.»
The insanely popular custom chatbots become a thing of the past in China. (Picture: generated)The popular chatbots Doubao and Qwen are shutting down their personalization features after China enacts the world’s first regulation of «anthropomorphic» AI agents.
They had both offered the ability to create custom agents and chatbots that would establish emotional bonds with users, and act as humanlike companions.
As of July 15, this becomes illegal in China, after the awkwardly specifically named «Interim Measures for the Administration of Artificial Intelligence Anthropomorphic Interaction Services» goes into effect.
This is the first regulation of its kind, and bans bots that «simulate human personality traits, thinking patterns and communication styles to provide sustained emotional interaction,»The South China Morning Post writes.
The personalized service of the two chatbots were used by millions, many of them kids, and often replaced real-life human interaction, as one in seven young adults in China used them to form romantic relationships, Decrypt.io writes.
UNICEF has hailed the new law, calling it a «pioneering policy [that] marks a significant global step towards regulating AI powered emotional interaction services.»
Meta’s new «Watermelon» is coming soon, they promise. (Picture: generated)Meta’s successor to «Avocado», or Muse Spark, is already in training and uses «an order of magnitude» more power, the head of the Superintelligence Lab, Alexandr Wang, said at an internal meeting.
The model is «coming soon» and will bring «big improvements in coding and agentic capabilities,» he adds in an X post.
GPT-5.5 is, however, not the current state of the art any more, that would be Claude Fable or newly launched GPT-5.6, both of which face restrictions by the US government.
This isn’t discouraging the Superintelligence head, saying «I think you’ll like what we have cooking» on X.
Fable 5 is the most expensive model from Anthropic, and it uses a lot of subagents. (Picture: Anthropic)Just as people are digging into their allocation of Claude Fable 5 usage on the paid tiers, they are running up to another wall: The model is very expensive and will chew through your alotted tokens in no time at all.
One ML engineer on reddit said it tore through a 5 page research paper while comparing it to a whitepaper with 174 subagents to review the results from 7 original agents and «ate through my max 20x 5 hour limit in ~15 minutes.»
Meta could soon be renting out excess compute, as it continues to build out capacity. (Picture: Adobe)Already sitting on one of the world’s largest compute clusters with plans to add some $145 billion worth more just this year — Meta is making contingency plans.
Bloomberg (paywalled) is reporting that they are now planning to form a cloud computing company to compete with AWS, Azure and Google Cloud, aiming to sell «excess capacity» to paying customers.
The idea is a hedge against overcapacity, Axios reports, quoting Zuckerberg as saying in May: «that is an option that we have, and that is partially what gives us confidence in investing in building this out.»
The new unit would offer raw compute to companies looking to train models, or could offer access to models from other AI labs and rent out the infrastructure to power them. This would be similar to services from Amazon and Azure.
SpaceX, now incorporating X.ai, faced a similar problem when their compute power got bigger than their needs, and struck deals with Anthropic and Google to sell excess compute access, Reuters notes.
It is estimated that Meta currently sits on 20 gigawatts of capacity, and it plans to add another 14 GW over the next years, Axios says.
Fable 5 spooked the government enough to ban it, but now it’s back online with even stronger safeguards. (Picture: Shutterstock)As of July 1, the Mythos-class model is available on wide release to paying customers, after the Commerce department lifted their export controls on June 30.
Anthropic hails the news, but cautions that recent events have highlighted the need for a «consistent way to assess and fix potential «jailbreaks,»» after two weeks of grueling exchanges with the administration.
Commerce secretary Howard Lutnick said on X that they had «worked closely with Anthropic to […] ensure alignment across the US Government and strengthen America’s leadership in AI,» Axios reports.
The Fable 5 model became somewhat of a joke in the AI community for having such strong safeguards that it would not answer anything even remotely related to security or biology, but Amazon engineers got it to output code for an exploit, leading to the export ban on June 12.
This behavior is now blocked 99% of the time, and Anthropic has agreed to even further safeguards on the model, pledging to work even more closely with the government in the future, including on vetting pre-release models.
AI accelerated hacking is changing how Apple deals with system patches. (Picture: generated)After releasing a 26.5.2 update across its devices to fix over 25 bugs today, Apple said the fixes were originally intended for the next point release of their operating systems — the 26.6.
Concerns about AI-accelerated hacking tools made the company push up the updates sooner in a dedicated release, according to Reuters.
This is the new reality, they say, where the time to develop malware has been greatly reduced by AI — and the time window for fixing bugs has likewise decreased.
Apple did not say if any of the vulnerabilities they rectified in the latest release had been exploited in the wild yet, which used to be the criteria for a rapid response.
The company is one of the «trusted partners» on Project Glasswing, and enjoys access to Anthropic’s Mythos Preview model to probe and detect flaws in their software, MacRumors notes, but it is not known if Mythos was used in this particular case.
The Codex keypad looks like an iteration of an existing product, not something entirely new. (Picture: OpenAI)The OpenAI Developers account on X teased a video of a square device with backlit keys made in collaboration with Work Louder, along with the date July 15th.
It’s likely a small keypad for common Codex shortcuts, as mentioned by the post, and it will be the first hardware device (co-)developed by OpenAI. Not a flashy new phone or the highly anticipated AI hardware device, which would take years to develop.
Work Louder is mostly famous for mechanical keyboards and custom keypads, and makes a $144 13-key wireless pad, complete with a tiny joystick.
The device being teased in the video looks like a carbon copy of the Creator Micro 2 pad described above, save for the backlit keys.
That should offer a hint for how OpenAI will be playing its hardware — as a premium Codex add-on, likely also with a premium price.
Opus 4.8 was released in May, meaning the gap to Chinese models has closed considerably. (Picture: generated)While not matching GPT-5.5 or Opus 4.8 across the board, the GLM-5.2 is the first open model to come within spitting distance (about 1% on some tests) on coding and cybersecurity tasks at open source benchmarks.
That means Chinese AI lab Z.ai is catching up to cyber capabilities considered by some to be too dangerous to release publicly, and is edging closer to Mythos or GPT-5.6.
The concern is that the new model, released on June 16, is open source and open weight with an MIT license — meaning that anyone can adjust its guardrails and play around with it on any computer capable of running it.
That has researchers worried that China is not only catching up, but that the model might find its way into the hands of bad actors — who will be supercharged when looking for hacking targets, causing what they term «bugmaggedon.»
With Mythos and GPT-5.6 being blocked by the US government, security teams might be tempted to turn to these models at a sixth of the cost of the American frontier, especially as they develop further, notes benchmark provider Semgrep.
Mythos 5 will become available on Project Glasswing after the government lifts its ban. (Picture: Shutterstock)After two weeks of purgatory and almost daily explanatory meetings, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick sent a letter to Anthropic on Friday, clearing one of two models on hold for release:
— I have determined that appropriate safeguards are in place to permit certain trusted partners to access the Claude Mythos 5 Model, he writes to chief compute officer Tom Brown, according to Semafor, who scooped the story.
Mythos 5 was only intended for a limited release through the Glasswing project, for use by a trusted set of government agencies and corporations to test their cyber defenses.
UPDATE: On Saturday, Axios is reporting that Fable 5 might be next in line, with «insiders» predicting it might be released next week, and Anthropic anticipating access «soon.»
The letter also says that «Anthropic has committed to work with the U.S. government on protocols and standards and releases,» and talks are progressing toward a release of Fable, though «the timeline is unclear,» according to Semafor.
The flagship GPT-5.6 Sol is the new state of the art for cyber capabilities. (Picture: Adobe)Caught in yet another government AI debacle, the new models won’t be publicly released until «the coming weeks.» It is getting presented today, and released to «a small group of trusted parties,» said by Axios to number in the twenties.
— We don’t believe this kind of government access process should become the long-term default, writes OpenAI, and says — we [are working] with the Administration to develop the cyber Executive Order framework and a repeatable process for future model releases.
In its presentation, OpenAI details three models in the GPT-5.6 series. Sol is the state-of-the-art Mythos-beating model, while Terra is «a balanced model for everyday work,» and delivers on par with GPT-5.5 at half the cost, and Luna is the cost-focused model «delivering stronger capability at our lowest cost.»
Strong on cyber
The models, particularly Sol, are very strong on cyber defense, and are able to identify security vulnerabilities, but not able to execute automated attacks due to strong safeguards, built using 700,000 A100-equivalent GPU hours of red-teaming.
Sol beats Mythos 5 on coding and cybersecurity and uses fewer tokens for better performance on biology tasks. It also comes with a new max mode, which gives more time for better reasoning, and an ultra mode which uses subagents for more complex work.
Prices for Sol are at $5 input/$30 output, for Terra is $2.50 input/$15 output, and Luna is at $1 input/$6 output, and general availability is up to higher powers.
GPT-5.6 is officially under government review due to «security concerns.» (Picture: generated)First reported by The Information, OpenAI has agreed to the Trump administration’s demands that it stagger the release of the upcoming GPT-5.6 over security concerns.
The model is said to be on par with Anthropic’s Mythos and Fable 5, which were abruptly pulled from the market after an export ban from the administration just two weeks ago.
Axios is quoting sources familiar saying that GPT-5.6 will only be released to a «small set of government-approved partners,» as the White House previews its abilities.
This preview period is expected to last «a couple of weeks,» CEO Sam Altman told staff in an internal OpenAI meeting, TechCrunch reports.
During this time, the administration itself will supposedly approve access to the model on a case-by-case basis, according to The Verge.
The Trump admin issued an executive order on AI about three weeks ago, setting up a voluntary mechanism for AI labs to submit their models for 30 days of pre-release testing. This gave the government 60 days to come up with criteria, but it isn’t quite ready yet — hence this ad-hoc approach.
The Jalapeño chip offers substantially better performance per watt than anything on the market. (Picture: OpenAI)The new inference chip, developed with help from OpenAI’s models in collaboration with Broadcom, has compressed what is normally a glacial, years-long process into just a short sprint.
— We believe [this] to be the fastest ASIC development cycle ever achieved in high-performance advanced semiconductors, OpenAI says.
The chip is designed specifically for OpenAI’s needs on current and upcoming language models, and to combine the power of current AI accelerators with the shorter latency of «specialized systems,» like Cerebras’ hardware.
— The world is moving to a compute-powered economy, says Greg Brockman, President and Co-Founder of OpenAI. — Jalapeño is part of our long-term full-stack infrastructure strategy to make compute more abundant.
The new silicon will be deployed at gigawatt-scale data centers just as fast as it was made, starting with Microsoft «and other partners» already in 2026, Broadcom says. It is only the first design in what the companies expect to be generations of products.
Jalapeño is already running LLM workloads in the lab, delivering «substantially better» performance per watt than «the current state-of-the-art,» OpenAI says.
