OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the company made ‘many changes' during a collaborative back-and-forth with the Trump administration before winning approval to release GPT-5.6 to the public, in a CNBC interview. GPT-5.6 had been limited to select partners after the administration pressured OpenAI to stagger the release, and goes public Thursday after the government gave a green light following testing for potential problems. Altman also pushed back on reports that OpenAI offered the US government a 5% stake, calling them inaccurate, and answered ‘I don't know' when asked whether it will go public this year. Rival Anthropic went through a similar process last month, briefly disabling its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models under Commerce Department export controls before the restrictions were lifted once it added cybersecurity safeguards.
