Good new first: Sol is a smart, efficient, and a significant step forward. It is the same price as GPT-5.5. Also launching in the GPT-5.6 family is Terra, with 5.5-level performance at half the price.

Bad news: at the request of the US government, it is launching today in limited preview instead of the open access launch we were planning on. We are working with the government to get to general availability as fast as we can.

I think it is quite reasonable to roll out models--especially as they reach significant new levels of capability--in this way. It fits with our long-held strategy of iterative deployment. But this isn't quite the process that we think is optimal.

Now we will with the government to attempt to get to a transparent, reliable process for early access, and to ensure that as long as our safeguards work as intended we can release widely. We want to be a reliable, dependable partner that works with all stakeholders, and we also want to live by our mission of benefiting all of humanity. I believe the government shares most of our goals, and that they are overall doing a good job in a very difficult situation.

We will work as quickly as we can to get this model in your hands and we hope you will love it.