
The White House is asking OpenAI to slow roll the release of its new model over safety concerns
Quick Answer
OpenAI is delaying the public release of its new model, GPT 5.6, at the request of the Trump administration due to safety concerns.
Quick Take
OpenAI is delaying the public release of its new model, GPT 5.6, at the request of the Trump administration due to safety concerns. Instead, it will be shared with a limited group of partners to address potential risks before broader deployment.
Key Points
- OpenAI's GPT 5.6 will not be released to the general public immediately.
- The Trump administration raised safety concerns regarding the new model.
- Only a select group of partners will have access to GPT 5.6 initially.
- The decision reflects ongoing regulatory scrutiny of AI technologies.
📖 Reader Mode
~3 min readOpenAI’s release of its newest model, GPT 5.6, reportedly won’t be like its previous releases. Instead of distributing it to the public, the company plans to share it only with a select group of close partners because the Trump administration told it to, reports The Information.
At a meeting this week, CEO Sam Altman reportedly told staff that the government would be “approving access customer by customer” during a preview period. Altman reportedly added that if the limited release goes well, OpenAI hopes to follow with a general, broader release a “couple of weeks later.”
In other words, the Trump administration appears to be pressuring OpenAI to do what Anthropic is already voluntarily doing: keeping its most powerful AI models under wraps.
According to The Information, OpenAI’s new model is not only being reviewed by the administration, but its staffers also “worked closely” with the government on the upcoming release. The agencies that reportedly asked for a limited release were the Office of the National Cyber Director and the Office of Science and Technology Policy.
The Trump administration — which originally positioned itself as taking a “hands off” approach to AI — has in recent months pushed for federal oversight of new models. Earlier this month, Trump signed an executive order directing certain AI companies to voluntarily submit new models to the government for testing and evaluation before releasing them publicly.
Earlier this year, Anthropic sparked no small amount of controversy when it announced that its new frontier cyber model, Claude Mythos, would only be released to a small coterie of partners through a program called Project Glasswing. Anthropic argued that its model was simply too powerful and could, in the wrong hands, cause more harm than good. Observers have since debated whether Anthropic’s rhetoric is a mere marketing gimmick or a legitimate attempt to keep a powerful model from being misused. The answer may be somewhere in between.
Cybercriminals have used automated tools for a very long time, but in the age of generative AI, they now have more digital ammunition than ever before. LLMs have proven adept at writing malware, and some can even execute entire ransomware attacks autonomously.
The specific concern with frontier cyber tools like Mythos is that they are ostensibly capable of both identifying and exploiting software vulnerabilities at speeds that no human analyst could match. Since many software systems contain hidden bugs that act as entry points into enterprise networks, this obviously poses an obvious and significant problem for any organization running complex software infrastructure. That said, since these models remain closed to the public, it’s difficult to tell just how much of a threat they really are.
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Lucas is a senior writer at TechCrunch, where he covers artificial intelligence, consumer tech, and startups. He previously covered AI and cybersecurity at Gizmodo. You can contact Lucas by emailing lucas.ropek@techcrunch.com.
— Originally published at techcrunch.com
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