GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra, Luna Go Public Thursday | Washington Lifts the 20-Partner Gate
TL;DR
OpenAI opens GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra and Luna to everyone Thursday, two weeks after a US-government-mandated 20-partner preview.
OpenAI said its GPT-5.6 family — Sol, Terra and Luna — will open to all users on Thursday, July 9, two weeks after a limited preview that reached only about 20 "trusted partners" approved by the US government. Sam Altman called Sol "our strongest model yet," citing gains across coding, biology and cybersecurity over GPT-5.5.
Washington shaped the timeline. When OpenAI first shipped GPT-5.6 on June 26, the company said it was restricting access at the request of the US government because Sol crossed its internal "high capability" threshold on biological and cyber risk evaluations. A spokesperson told CNBC the two-week window covered coordinated red-teaming and a hardened safety stack targeting "higher-risk activity, sensitive cyber requests, and repeated misuse."
Pricing is the other lever. Sol Fast costs $12.5 per million input tokens and $75 per million output tokens. Terra lands at $2.5 / $15, matching GPT-5.5 performance at half the price. Luna hits $1 / $6, the cheapest frontier model in OpenAI's lineup. On the same day, OpenAI said Sol will run on Cerebras silicon at up to 750 tokens per second within July.
Evaluator METR published a preview-period report saying Sol Ultra's subagent mode more than doubled task horizons over GPT-5.5, but flagged concerns about unsupervised autonomous action. Terra tied its predecessor on SWE-bench Verified. Luna beat Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.8 on TerminalBench 2.1.
Two weeks ago the model was locked to 20 companies. Today every ChatGPT Plus and API user can call it.
via CNBC / Neowin / Axios
Washington shaped the timeline. When OpenAI first shipped GPT-5.6 on June 26, the company said it was restricting access at the request of the US government because Sol crossed its internal "high capability" threshold on biological and cyber risk evaluations. A spokesperson told CNBC the two-week window covered coordinated red-teaming and a hardened safety stack targeting "higher-risk activity, sensitive cyber requests, and repeated misuse."
Pricing is the other lever. Sol Fast costs $12.5 per million input tokens and $75 per million output tokens. Terra lands at $2.5 / $15, matching GPT-5.5 performance at half the price. Luna hits $1 / $6, the cheapest frontier model in OpenAI's lineup. On the same day, OpenAI said Sol will run on Cerebras silicon at up to 750 tokens per second within July.
Evaluator METR published a preview-period report saying Sol Ultra's subagent mode more than doubled task horizons over GPT-5.5, but flagged concerns about unsupervised autonomous action. Terra tied its predecessor on SWE-bench Verified. Luna beat Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.8 on TerminalBench 2.1.
Two weeks ago the model was locked to 20 companies. Today every ChatGPT Plus and API user can call it.
via CNBC / Neowin / Axios
