So much for voluntary review.
You may not be able to use the new ChatGPT 5.6 as soon as it's finished. According to a report in The Information, OpenAI plans to stagger the release of its new AI model, and the first users will only be parties that are approved by the federal government. The publication's sources said that, according to a staff memo from CEO Sam Altman, federal leaders will be "approving access customer by customer during this preview period," hopefully followed a "couple of weeks later" by a more general release of the 5.6 model.
"We've made clear to the US government that this is not our preferred long term model, and will work with them and others in industry to achieve a more sustainable approach for future releases," Altman reportedly told employees in the memo.
Several agencies appear to be involved in directing the change in course from OpenAI. The Information cited interactions with the Office of the National Cyber Director and the Office of Science and Technology Policy, as well as involvement from Department of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. Neither the White House's nor the Office of the National Cyber Director's representatives replied to the publication's requests for comment.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order earlier this month asking AI companies to participate in a voluntary federal review of their more powerful models before they are publicly released. The government is expected to create a framework to standardize how it will assess new models. Shortly after, however, OpenAI rival Anthropic disabled all access to two of its recent models following a federal directive. That order didn't provide specifics around its security concerns, only that the government wanted to block access to Anthropic's tools for any foreign nationals. Between that instance and this additional stage to OpenAI's latest rollout, there still appears to be a fair bit of confusion around how the review process will work and just how voluntary it is.