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.
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.
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 new Cyber model not only finds flaws, but offers to fix them automatically. (Picture: Adobe)Less fabled than the recent Mythos releases, GPT-5.5-Cyber is just as capable, OpenAI claims, and has benchmarks to show it.
The update scores 85.6% in CyberGym versus 83.8% for Mythos 5, and is likewise only available to vetted cybersecurity professionals.
— AI has changed the physics of cybersecurity, OpenAI says, — The bottleneck historically has been finding vulnerabilities, but now defenders are overwhelmed with the number of vulnerabilities found.
Therefore, their Daybreak suite, which includes the Cyber model and Codex Security, moves beyond just threat scanning to actually offering vulnerability patches to fix them.
Since the launch as preview in March, OpenAI claims to have scanned over 30 million commits across 30,000 codebases, with humans having marked 70,000 findings as fixed and 500,000 findings having been fixed automatically.
Altman asked the G7 not to leave regulation of increasingly powerful models to the AI labs. (Picture: generated)Amodei, Altman and Hassabis were all present at a working lunch with the Group of Seven countries Wednesday, and they all asked «the free world» for stronger regulation.
— Do not cede your responsibilities to AI labs like mine, OpenAI’s Sam Altman said, according to Reuters. — We develop the technology, and the citizens of the free world make the rules.
— From one day to the next [the USA] can turn off the switch, said French President Emmanuel Macron, reported by The Financial Times, as he, too, called for stronger regulation and cooperation.
There was also a strong push at the meetup to expand access beyond the USA to Anthropic’s Project Glasswing and the Mythos Preview model, used in a race to find cyber vulnerabilities in critical systems before the capabilities become widely available.
The meeting ended in an official joint statement that would task finance officials, regulators and cybersecurity experts with evaluating AI’s impact on financial stability, productivity and labor markets.
Finding themselves thrust into politics, Anthropic is having difficulty getting through, Axios reports. (Picture: Shutterstock)As security researchers and executives are urging a retreat from the Mythos ban, Axios is reporting that Anthropic is failing to «communicate effectively.»
They were scheduled to meet in person with the White House on Monday, sources tell CNBC, and are now finding themselves deeply enmeshed in current politics.
Government officials are now candidly telling Axios that Anthropic «screwed» them, saying they failed to «honor» the recent Executive Order on AI — which calls for a 30-day vetting period for new models, and are calling Anthropic a «bad actor.»
There are also differing narratives in the Axios report, where on the one hand, Anthropic says they «received explicit approval» to deploy Fable, and another where the administration threatened export controls several weeks ago, fearing the model could be exploited by bad actors.
The exploit uncovered in the Fable and Mythos models are replicable in other frontier and open source models, security researchers say in an open letter, and shutting down Fable at a critical time gives an advantage to attackers over defenders. They say there is only a 90-day window until Chinese models reach the same capabilities.
Future models should be voluntarily vetted before release, but the mechanism isn’t in place yet. (Picture: Shutterstock)Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has enacted export controls on the new models, banning their use in any foreign countries and by foreign nationals — and Anthropic responded quickly by completely blocking access for everyone.
The triggering factor appears to be that a company was able to jailbreak the models, potentially getting them to perform harmful actions, an administration official tells Axios.
According to Anthropic, the claim concerns a limited jailbreak and a «minor vulnerability,» not considered a systemwide issue, and says it is impossible to guarantee against this 100% for any model by any provider.
Hardly any questions about cybersecurity, biology or chemistry get through to Fable 5. (Picture: Shutterstock)As more people are testing out Anthropic’s new, Mythos-class Fable 5, many are finding it so restrictive it wont even answer the most basic questions, TechCrunch writes.
The Verge tested it on the fundamentals of biology and found it wouldn’t even answer «easy» questions, about cell membranes or on how mRNA vaccines work.
TechCrunch is reporting on several developers who are complaining that just including the word «cyber» in a query is enough to trip it up, while others say it even refuses to write «secure» code, thinking it might be cybersecurity related.
In order to release the Mythos-based model, Anthropic made a tradeoff on very strict limits for it, and the fallback option is the still very capable Claude Opus 4.8, released in late May.
These tight restrictions aren’t by mistake, Anthropic says;
— To deploy Fable 5 safely, we believe it was necessary to be overly conservative with our safeguards so they block most queries tied to biology work, Anthropic spokesperson Paruul Maheshwary told The Verge.
Fable 5 uses a second AI to monitor throughput and prevent misuse. (Picture: Anthropic)After refusing to release any Mythos models for fear of abuse of its advanced cyber firepower, Anthropic has finally come up with enough safeguards to make it to general rotation. Its capabilities «exceed those of any model we’ve ever made available,» they say.
— The capabilities of models like Fable 5 and Mythos 5 have the potential to do profound good for the world, Anthropic writes in its presentation, and adds — We’ve also seen it in life sciences research, where the models are positing novel hypotheses and speeding up the development of new therapeutics.
Human review might take more time than writing the code in the near future, Anthropic says. (Picture: Anthropic)Recursive self-improvement may come sooner than we are prepared for, the AI lab says in a new report.
They are now foreseeing a not-so-distant future where Claude can autonomously write and improve on itself, and is warning that humans might lose control.
Compared to 2021-2025, Anthropic is now producing 8x more code with AI tools, and this rate is doubling every four months, approaching a point where human judgment could become the bottleneck in software design.
With the more capable Mythos Preview model, researchers at the company estimate they could output another 4 times as much code on top of the already accelerating trend.
There is no sign of this progress stopping, and Anthropic is now calling for a global slowdown so that society has time to adapt. Even if growth did stop, or somehow development stalled, we are only just beginning to scratch the surface of adopting the already existing technology, the lab says.
The European Union has a long checklist of things to improve in the AI age, and stands ready to invest «at scale.» (Picture: Shutterstock)The EU is increasingly concerned at their reliance on the USA for all things cloud, software and AI, and is taking urgent steps to counter it, or, as they put it, to «strengthen Europe’s digital resilience.»
— We cannot afford to depend on others for the technologies that keep our hospitals running, our energy grids stable and our services secure, Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen says in a statement.
