OpenAI said Friday it is restricting the release of its new artificial intelligence model at the request of President Donald Trump’s administration, as the government expands vetting of AI products for cybersecurity risks. The company said its new AI product, called GPT-5.6 Sol, would be accessible only to customers approved by the Trump administration. That means access to the newest machine intelligence is now being filtered through the same political apparatus that decides who gets to play and who gets shut out.
OpenAI said it viewed the testing period as a temporary step on the “path to broader availability in the coming weeks.” But for now, the gate is closed, and the gatekeepers are in Washington. OpenAI said its new Sol model, pronounced “SOHL” like the Spanish word for sun, “is better at helping people find and fix vulnerabilities” than it is at carrying out cyberattacks and does not cross the company’s own risk threshold. The company said there could be unforeseen risks, especially if the model is combined with other tools, and said that uncertainty, along with the model’s broader step change in capabilities, is why it is pairing the model’s increased capabilities with stronger safeguards and a phased release.
OpenAI has not named any of the roughly 20 customers that have been approved to use the new model so far. The company said, “We don’t believe this kind of government access process should become the long-term default.” That line lands like a warning from inside the machine: once the state gets a hand on the switch, it rarely lets go cleanly.
Who Gets the Keys
Anthropic, OpenAI’s chief rival, announced hours later that the Trump administration had approved a limited release of its strongest cybersecurity model, two weeks after the U.S. Commerce Department effectively banned it. Both companies said their newest models would be available to small groups of trusted partners. Anthropic said the government on Friday lifted restrictions on one of its models, Mythos 5, enabling it to be “redeployed to a small group of cyber defenders and infrastructure providers.”
That phrase says plenty: a small group, selected and trusted, gets access while everyone else waits outside the fence. OpenAI’s staggered release follows actions the government took earlier this month against Anthropic, maker of the Claude chatbot. Anthropic took offline two new AI models, known as Fable 5 and Mythos 5, just days after unveiling them to comply with a Trump directive blocking their use by foreign nationals. Officials have grown increasingly concerned since Anthropic warned earlier this year that its Mythos model was adept at finding software flaws in a way that could be weaponized by malicious hackers and threaten critical computer networks around the world.
Trump earlier in June signed an executive order on AI oversight that established a framework for the federal government to vet the national security risks of the most advanced AI systems for up to 30 days before their public release. The order described participation by AI developers as voluntary, but the framework has not yet been fully developed. In practice, voluntary for the powerful often means mandatory for everyone who wants to keep operating.
The People in the Room
The White House said Friday it continues to collaborate with frontier AI labs on addressing the challenges of scaling the fast-growing technology. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman spoke with U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick about the model release Wednesday, part of a series of negotiations in recent weeks between AI industry executives and Trump officials. Anthropic has also been part of those talks, but Amodei has had a more contentious relationship with the Trump administration.
Some of Trump’s allies have laid blame on San Francisco-based Anthropic and CEO Dario Amodei for the need for heightened government scrutiny. Investor David Sacks, who co-leads Trump’s council of technology and science advisers, said on a recent podcast, “Dario came to Washington a few months ago, back in April, and basically said that he had created a cyber weapon called Mythos,” and that he “spiked the cortisol level, got everyone really worried.” Sacks said, “And there was some truth to it in terms of the sense that this model had advanced cyber capabilities.”
U.S. Rep. Lori Trahan, a Massachusetts Democrat and co-author of a bipartisan bill that would regulate AI, said in a statement that she is concerned “the Trump administration is deciding company by company who gets access to the newest AI model. No law. No process. No oversight. Just appointees in Washington deciding who’s in and who’s out.” Her complaint points straight at the machinery of control: access by appointment, not by public accountability.
Stanford University cybersecurity expert Alex Stamos, who is the chief product officer at AI security company Corridor and a former chief security officer at Facebook parent Meta, said on a call with reporters earlier this week, “I just want to say that pretty much nobody in the cybersecurity industry believes that there’s any factual basis for this action.” Stamos said he reviewed an analysis of research on Fable by Anthropic’s primary cloud computing backer, Amazon, and didn’t find any risks that aren’t present with other publicly available AI models, including those made in China. He said, “If the administration is honest about wanting the United States to beat China in this race, then this is about the dumbest thing they could possibly do.”
Anthropic said Friday it was “pleased” by the partial release of Mythos late Friday and will “continue to work with the government to expand access” and make Fable available again to general users. Lutnick told Anthropic in a letter dated Friday that its work to address the government’s concerns “yielded significant progress.”
The government’s heightened AI oversight adds another complication to exploratory moves by OpenAI as well as Anthropic to take their companies public on Wall Street, following SpaceX’s record-setting June 12 initial public offering. Trump has floated the possibility of the U.S. government owning a stake in leading AI companies, describing a concept where “pieces could be given to the American public, where the American public essentially becomes a partner with the companies.” That pitch dresses up ownership and control as public participation, while the real decisions remain concentrated at the top.