OpenAI releases GPT-5.6 to select users vetted by US Government

- **OpenAI** is the San Francisco–based company behind ChatGPT, the world’s most widely used chatbot. It started as a non-profit AI research lab and later created a for-profit arm to raise the billions of dollars needed to build ever-larger AI models. - **GPT-5.6** is a successor to GPT-4 and GPT-4o — OpenAI's flagship large language model. Each new generation aims to be more capable, more reliable, and better at reasoning, but also vastly more expensive to train and run. - The key twist in this story is that GPT-5.6 is **not being released to the general public**. Instead, access is limited to "select users vetted by the US Government." This reflects growing US government concern about AI safety and national security — the fear that advanced AI could be used for cyberattacks, disinformation, or weapons design. - This marks a major shift from the previous norm in AI, where new models were broadly released to developers and consumers. It signals that frontier AI may increasingly be treated like nuclear technology or advanced military hardware: too powerful to simply hand out.