OpenAI restricts release of newest ChatGPT model to Trump-approved group during testing period

ChatGPT maker OpenAI said Friday it is restricting the release of its new artificial intelligence model at the request of U.S. President Donald Trump's administration, the latest in an unprecedented government vetting of AI products that could pose cybersecurity risks.

OpenAI said its new AI product, called GPT-5.6 Sol, would only be available for now to a "small group of trusted partners" approved by the Trump administration.

"We don't believe this kind of government access process should become the long-term default," OpenAI said in a statement.

The company said it viewed the testing period as a temporary step on the "path to broader availability in the coming weeks."

OpenAI's staggered release of a powerful new AI system follows actions the government took earlier this month against OpenAI rival Anthropic, maker of the Claude chatbot.

Anthropic took its newest AI models Fable 5 and Mythos 5 offline just days after publicly releasing them to comply with a Trump directive blocking their use by foreign nationals.

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The White House said Friday it continues to collaborate with frontier AI labs on addressing the challenges of scaling the fast-growing technology.

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 signed an executive order on AI oversight earlier in June 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.

San Francisco-based OpenAI said its new Sol model "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. But it acknowledged there could be unforeseen risks, especially if its model is combined with other tools.

"That uncertainty, along with the model's broader step change in capabilities, is why we are pairing the model's increased capabilities with stronger safeguards and a phased release," the company said Friday.

A broad group of cybersecurity experts has criticized the government's actions that led Anthropic to shut down Fable, which the company had pitched as a safer version of Mythos. It's now been unavailable for two weeks.

"I just want to say that pretty much nobody in the cybersecurity industry believes that there's any factual basis for this action," Stanford University cybersecurity expert Alex Stamos said on a call with reporters earlier this week.

Stamos, the chief product officer at AI security company Corridor and a former chief security officer at Facebook parent Meta, 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.

"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," Stamos said.