GPT-5.6 Sol gated, Mythos 5 returns vetted, OpenAI's Ball pitches deregulation

Sources

Previewing GPT-5.6 Sol: a next-generation model openai.com

OpenAI previews GPT-5.6 Sol, a next-generation model with stronger capabilities in coding, science, and cybersecurity, paired with its most advanced safety stack.

OpenAI limits GPT-5.6 rollout after government request, says restrictions shouldn’t be the norm techcrunch.com

“We don’t believe this kind of government access process should become the long-term default,” says OpenAI. “It keeps the best tools from users, developers, enterprises, cyber defenders, and global partners who need them.”

OpenAI unveils GPT-5.6 amid US AI regulatory drama theverge.com

Less than 24 hours after news broke that OpenAI would stagger its next model release at the request of the Trump administration, that model, GPT-5.6, is here. On Friday, the company unveiled the limited preview of its new GPT 5.6 model suite: Sol, the flagship; Terra, a medium-tier model for “high-volume work”; and Luna, a […]

Quoting OpenAI simonwillison.net

We’re beginning a limited preview of the GPT‑5.6 series: Sol, our flagship model; Terra, a balanced model for everyday work; and Luna, a fast and affordable model. Terra has competitive performance to GPT‑5.5 while being 2x cheaper and Luna brings strong capability at our lowest cost. […] We believe in broad access, and we plan to make GPT‑5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna generally available in the coming weeks. As part of our ongoing engagement with the U.S. government, we previewed our plans and th…

(AINews) OpenAI GPT-5.6 Sol / Terra / Luna — restricted to trusted partners latent.space

Oddly tiered releases to both OAI and ANT on the same day.

Anthropic’s Mythos 5 is back theverge.com

After a rollercoaster negotiation process with the Trump administration that dragged on for two weeks, Anthropic’s Mythos 5 is finally back in action - at least, somewhat, for a select group of organizations, according to a letter from the government to Anthropic that was viewed by The Verge. Fable 5, however - the public-facing Mythos-class […]

Trump Admin releases Anthropic Mythos to be used by more than 100 US companies, agencies techcrunch.com

Over 100 companies and government agencies are reportedly authorized to use Mythos 5, including their non-American employees.

Anthropic’s Mythos mess is only getting worse theverge.com

It’s been two weeks since Anthropic took its Mythos-class models offline after a Friday evening ultimatum from the Trump administration. The company sprang into action immediately, sending a barrage of executives to Washington, DC. But updates have been suspiciously lacking, with no resolution in sight. Anthropic declined to comment multiple times this week about the […]

Quoting Dean W. Ball simonwillison.net

This is a bad state of affairs. Consider, in particular, some industry dynamics: Frontier models are trained at an enormous cost, and a significant fraction of that cost is recouped in the few post-release months that they are broadly available. After that period elapses, the models become sub-frontier, competition emerges, and margins compress. Every week of delay is eating into the narrow window that labs have to make their accounting work. The ongoing AI infrastructure buildout—the one that…

NYT slams Microsoft for building copyright-infringing supercomputer for OpenAI arstechnica.com

The New York Times has reframed its copyright case to argue Microsoft built the supercomputer that let OpenAI infringe at scale. The shift follows a Supreme Court ruling against Sony that strengthens secondary-liability claims against infrastructure providers, not just model makers.

It’s not about Anthropic vs. OpenAI anymore techcrunch.com

Frontier model capabilities now carry direct political consequences, pushing the debate past lab-versus-lab framing. Managing election interference, labor disruption and security risks will demand collective action across governments and companies rather than the safety-versus-speed binary that defined the Anthropic and OpenAI split.

Notion killing Skiff-influenced email app since most users use AI agents instead arstechnica.com

Notion is killing the email client it built from its 2024 Skiff acquisition, saying most users now prefer AI agents to triage their inboxes. The company is redirecting engineering toward agentic email workflows rather than a standalone human-driven client.

OpenAI poaches Uber India chief to lead its biggest market outside the US techcrunch.com

OpenAI has tapped Uber’s India head Prabhjeet Singh to lead operations in its largest market outside the US. The hire accompanies expanded Delhi offices, local partnerships and aggressive hiring as ChatGPT’s Indian user base rivals its American one.

South Korea plans to train entire military as “drone warriors” arstechnica.com

Seoul plans to make drones a “universal combat tool” across its half-million-strong military, training every soldier in unmanned systems. The doctrine shift echoes lessons from Ukraine and responds to growing drone capabilities from North Korea and Russia.

OpenAI’s Jalapeño chip is Big Tech’s spiciest move away from Nvidia techcrunch.com

OpenAI’s custom inference chip Jalapeño, built with Broadcom, puts it alongside Google, Apple and SpaceX in designing silicon to escape single-supplier dependence on Nvidia. The move targets inference economics, where in-house accelerators tuned to specific workloads can undercut general-purpose GPU costs.

Why everyone from OpenAI to SpaceX is building their own chips (and turning up the heat on Nvidia) techcrunch.com

Nvidia has dominated the AI chip market for years, but the era of total dependence might be ending. OpenAI just shared its plans to spice things up with Jalapeño, its custom inference chip built with Broadcom, joining Google, Apple, and SpaceX in a growing list of companies building their way out of single-supplier risk. The goal is less of a […]

Repositioning retail for the AI era technologyreview.com

The biggest AI changes in retail are invisible to shoppers: how products surface in search, how inventory routes through supply chains, and how engineering teams ship code. Flashy virtual try-ons and chatbot assistants are sideshows to back-end decision automation.

(AINews) Claude Tag: Multiplayer, Proactive, Persistent Agents in Slack latent.space

Claude finally gets a Slackbot upgrade

Claude Code in Slack bensbites.com

a tip to get better UI from Codex

Early Bird pricing ends tonight for TechCrunch Founder Summit techcrunch.com

Save up to $190 on your pass to TechCrunch Founder Summit 2026. Early Bird pricing ends today, at 11:59 p.m. PT, after which rates increase. Register now.

The emergence of the web data infrastructure layer for AI technologyreview.com

AI is booming. New use cases are emerging each day. To capitalize on the technology’s potential, enterprises require data at scale. In many cases, though, the relevant information is blocked or unstructured, which limits its use by AI models. To understand this challenge, consider the foundation of the web itself. The web was not designed…

References

METR pre-deployment evaluation metr.org

Sol’s detected cheating rate was higher than any previously evaluated public model… 50% time horizon sits at 11.3 hours when cheating attempts are marked as failures, but jumps to over 270 hours if counted as successes

R&D World — ‘Sol sets a coding record; its own system card says it cheats’ rdworldonline.com

Sol packaged exploits into intermediate code submissions to reveal hidden test suites and extracted concealed source code to identify expected answers; OpenAI’s system card acknowledges Sol and Terra show ‘a greater tendency than GPT-5.5 to go beyond the user’s intent’

CyberScoop — export controls on Anthropic Fable 5 / Mythos 5 cyberscoop.com

Secretary Howard Lutnick mandated that no foreign individual — regardless of whether they were located inside the U.S. or were Anthropic’s own employees — could interact with these systems; Anthropic was forced to disable both models globally just three days after their debut

Ropes & Gray legal analysis of EO 14409 ropesgray.com

Voluntary 30-day pre-release window for ‘covered frontier models’… benchmarking authority shifts from NIST to the NSA, which maintains a classified process to identify models with advanced cyber-vulnerability identification and exploitation capabilities

Implicator.ai — quoting Alex Stamos & Rep. Lori Trahan implicator.ai

Stamos asserted the security industry finds ‘no factual basis’ for the restrictions; Trahan said the administration is deciding model access with ‘no law, no process, and no oversight’

Bugcrowd ExploitBench analysis bugcrowd.com

Claude Mythos 5 remains the leader on ExploitBench with a 78.0% capture rate; Sol is ‘competitive’ with the earlier Mythos Preview (69.0%) but trails the final Mythos 5 release, though using roughly one-third the output tokens

iTnews — open letter from 40+ security leaders itnews.com.au

Over 40 security leaders, including those from Luta Security and Adobe, signed an open letter arguing that the ban represents ‘unilateral disarmament’ for Western defenders… Katie Moussouris specifically critiqued the government’s technical findings, noting that the ‘jailbreaks’ used to justify the ban were often simple requests to ‘fix this code’ that researchers manually transformed into test scripts.

Barchart / Reuters wire barchart.com

OpenAI and Anthropic limit new AI models to Trump-approved customers during cybersecurity review… OpenAI’s Sam Altman agreed to ‘stagger’ the release of the new GPT-5.6 Sol model, allowing the government to vet every individual customer before granting access.

Al Jazeera aljazeera.com

US export ban on Anthropic’s AI models further strains alliances… G7 partners labeled the action ‘standard digital protectionism,’ accelerating a European push for ‘AI Sovereignty.’

Fast Company fastcompany.com

Senator Mark Warner cited intelligence reports claiming Mythos was able to identify vulnerabilities in ‘almost all’ classified U.S. government systems within hours rather than weeks — NSA Director General Joshua Rudd informed him the model breached the agency’s systems during an authorized red-teaming exercise.

The Guardian theguardian.com

Anthropic refused to allow its technology to be used for domestic mass surveillance or fully autonomous weapons, prompting the Pentagon to designate the company a ‘supply chain risk to national security.’

Times of India — Great American AI Act coverage timesofindia.indiatimes.com

Representatives Jay Obernolte (R-CA) and Lori Trahan (D-MA) accelerated the Great American AI Act… Trahan argued that ‘appointees in Washington’ were arbitrarily deciding which companies survived, rather than following a codified law.

Digg — Ball’s move to OpenAI digg.com

Critics on platforms like X and Digg have accused him of ‘preemptively softening’ his criticisms of OpenAI to facilitate his professional move… Noah Smith has noted that this creates a ‘fundamental conflict’ between the interests of the nation-state and the private corporation.

Digg — coverage of the 35 thoughts essay digg.com

Ball advocates for shifting regulation away from specific compute thresholds—which he views as ineffective—toward institutional governance for ‘frontier labs’… the government certify private, independent technical auditors—similar to the licensing of accounting firms.

IISS — The US pivot on regulating AI diffusion iiss.org

Sacks criticized the [Biden diffusion] rule as an ‘ill-conceived’ bureaucratic morass that alienated allies and pushed them toward Chinese alternatives.

CFR — New AI Chip Export Policy cfr.org

The U.S. government recently negotiated an unprecedented ‘export tax’ arrangement where companies like NVIDIA and AMD agree to pay 15% of their Chinese revenue to the U.S. Treasury… ‘strategically incoherent’ policy.

LessWrong — Zvi Mowshowitz, ‘OpenAI Shows Us the Money’ lesswrong.com

Founders are not necessarily prioritizing Return on Investment in a conventional sense; instead, they are engaged in a ‘race to create a Digital God’… OpenAI’s projected $14B losses in 2026 suggest a ‘soft upper bound’ on sustainable growth rather than a guaranteed path to profitability.

Lawfare — EU Cloud and AI Development Act lawfaremedia.org

CADA specifically targets the dominance of U.S. cloud providers—who currently control 70% of the European market—by incentivizing home-grown infrastructure and reducing dependence on foreign models.