The rumor mill is kicking into high gear for OpenAI’s next GPT-5.6. It’s supposed to be largely on par with Fable 5, or kick it to the curb on some tests, according to X leaker Chetaslua who claims to have been testing it for a while.
OpenAI’s chief scientist, Jakub Pachocki, pre-announced the model as a «meaningful improvement,» but would not point to a timeline.
According to prediction markets, Kalshi has it out before July 15th, while Polymaket predicts it between June 30 and July 31, which seem like safe bets.
Mythos causing headaches for the NSA
According to The Economist (paywalled), the leader of the NSA and the Pentagon’s Cyber Command, General Joshua Rudd, apparently told Senator Mark Warner that they have had Anthropic’s Mythos model for testing for a while. He further said that it broke into «almost all» of their classified systems «not in weeks, but hours,» offering a window into how spooked cybersecurity experts are becoming in the race against time for when other models reach the same capabilities:
NSA saying Mythos, in hours broke into nearly all of their classified systems ??
Per The Economist pic.twitter.com/tYo75QGQ1i
— Jimmy Apples 🍎/acc (@apples_jimmy) June 21, 2026
Nano Banana to get successor
And it looks like Google’s smash hit «Nano Banana» is about to get a successor sometime soon. The new model will be called «Instant-ramen», according to the same Chetaslua, and it has apparently been showing up on LMArena and LMSYS, leading to high expectations from enthusiasts.
It should provide faster, «instant» generation, offer better quality, better text rendering and editing, and support multimodal capabilities. It’s also a hot topic on r/Singularity and r/Bard and just about every other social media site.
These rumors should of course be taken with a gran of salt, as none of them are officially confirmed and AI labs test experimental features on leaderboards all the time. But the grapevine buzz seems to be pointing to imminent releases — and they have at least progressed to the testing stage.