White House wants OpenAI to limit the launch of its next model

William Gibson once famously said that "the future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed." It appears that the same goes for frontier AI models.

According to The Information, the White House told OpenAI it wants the company to release its next model in a limited fashion, to a select group of close partners.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman reportedly told staff that the company's newest model, GPT 5.6, will be launched very differently than previous ones, with the government approving access "customer by customer."

Following this limited release period, the company should be able to launch the model more broadly a "couple of weeks" later, says the report.

OpenAI competitor Anthropic recently had to pull its most powerful model, Fable 5, after Trump's administration intervened to keep the model out of foreign hands. The company previously launched Mythos, an even more powerful model, as a limited release open only to a small set of pre-approved customers.

As for OpenAI's GPT 5.6, the model is reportedly a "meaningful improvement" over GPT 5.5, both in terms of context window size and efficiency.

In a memo sent to employees, Altman reportedly said that GPT 5.6 is not the company's preferred long term model, and that OpenAI will work with the government and others in the industry "to achieve a more sustainable approach for future releases."

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