OpenAI on Friday announced three new artificial intelligence models and said it is complying with the U.S. government's request to initially limit the rollout to a small group of trusted partners. The company said the models — GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra and Luna — will be generally available in the coming weeks, but for now the gatekeeping stays in place, with ordinary users, developers, enterprises, cyber defenders and global partners left waiting while officials and company executives decide who gets access.
Who Gets the Keys
OpenAI said it previewed the models' capabilities and shared its plans with the government ahead of Friday's launch. The company said, "We don't believe this kind of government access process should become the long-term default." It also said the process keeps the best tools from users, developers, enterprises, cyber defenders and global partners who need them. OpenAI did not disclose the names of the partners that can use its new models.
The company said it is working with the Trump administration to help establish a framework for such assessments and to develop a repeatable process for future model releases. OpenAI said, "We are taking this short-term step because we believe it is the strongest path to broader availability in the coming weeks." The language is polished, but the structure is plain enough: access to powerful tools is being filtered through state approval and corporate discretion before it reaches the public.
GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra and Luna are named according to their capability tiers, and OpenAI said Sol is its strongest offering yet. The model shows improvements across coding and biology, and OpenAI said it is the company's most capable model for cybersecurity. OpenAI said the model is better at helping users fix vulnerabilities than it is at carrying out end-to-end attacks, and it still does not cross into OpenAI's critical cybersecurity risk threshold, which is defined as bringing unprecedented new pathways to severe harm.
The State Sets the Terms
The announcement came two weeks after rival Anthropic announced it had to disable access to two of its latest models in order to comply with an export control directive from the Trump administration. Anthropic is in active negotiations with officials in Washington, D.C., but has not said when it expects its models to come back online. The Trump administration has taken a noticeably more hands-on approach to AI regulation since President Donald Trump signed an AI executive order earlier this month. The order, which was thin on specific details, asked AI developers to voluntarily allow the government to assess model capabilities ahead of a full release.
That is the machinery at work: an executive order with few details, a voluntary assessment regime, and companies moving quickly to show they are compliant. The result is not broad public control, but a managed rollout where the government and a handful of firms decide who gets what, when, and under what conditions.
On Wednesday, Chinese cybersecurity firm 360 reportedly unveiled Tulongfeng, an AI tool it says can go head-to-head with Anthropic's Mythos. The company said the cybersecurity-focused AI model is reportedly so powerful that the Trump administration has currently banned it and its more restricted version, Fable 5, from the hands of non-Americans. Earlier the same week, Sakana AI, a Tokyo-based AI startup, launched Fugu, a model named after the Japanese word for blowfish. Sakana said the frontier AI model stands shoulder-to-shoulder with leading models like Anthropic's Fable 5 and Mythos Preview. It is also designed for agents, with an ability to orchestrate access to other models through their APIs.
Who Fills the Gap
The two new Asian model products came as the U.S. government's ban drags on. The order that prevents Anthropic from global access to Mythos and Fable occurred two weeks ago. A spokesperson at Sakana AI told TechCrunch that the release of its new model was entirely coincidental, but the company has been capitalizing on the moment. Its website advertises delivering frontier capability without the risk of export controls.
Sakana co-founder Ren Ito said, "U.S. models remain important to Asia," and added, "We'd characterize the current moment in those terms rather than as a permanent realignment toward any one set of players." In an op-ed published in the Project Syndicate last week, Ito urged the U.S. federal government to consider that its first priority should be to preserve access for America's closest allies, and argued that AI should not become a technology that is hoarded; it should be one that is developed together.
David Ha, co-founder and CEO of Sakana, described Fugu as more than just a land grab during a vulnerable moment for U.S. competitors. He said it is designed to coordinate agent usage among many models. On X, he wrote, "Orchestration Models are the next frontier, beyond bigger models." He argued that relying on a single provider for national infrastructure is a risk the recent export controls made impossible to ignore. He wrote, "Access to top models can disappear overnight," and, "Collective intelligence is the practical hedge against this concentration of power."
Sakana, co-founded in 2023 by former Google researchers Ren Ito, Llion Jones and David Ha, makes affordable generative AI models that work well with small datasets and are optimized for the Japanese language and culture. The company is targeting Fugu at Japanese businesses and government agencies looking to reduce their exposure to tightening export controls, but it is not yet proclaiming a lasting shift away from U.S. AI in Asia. Anthropic had been on a historic growth trajectory, and the U.S. AI lab said its run-rate revenue crossed $47 billion in May 2026. How much of that depends on Asian enterprise customers is not publicly known. But in the weeks since the export order took effect, at least two companies, one in Tokyo and one in Beijing, have stepped into the space it left behind. Even if U.S. companies could win back trust should this ban ever end, local alternatives, trained to better understand local language and nuance, are already filling the gap. 360 did not respond to a request for comment.