OpenAI to Release GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna on Thursday Amid Contradictory US Regulatory Signals

OpenAI announced Wednesday that GPT-5.6 Sol, along with Terra and Luna, will launch publicly on Thursday, expanding preview access globally. The decision reverses an earlier posture in which the company held back general availability after the US government asked it to limit access to a short list of companies.

The White House responded with a statement emailed to InfoWorld, saying the US government "did not give OpenAI a 'green light,' approval or clearance to release its models." The statement emphasized that "no such permission is required or granted" and that "decisions on timing and scope of releases rest entirely with the companies," citing the June 2 executive order.

Yet last month, the US Commerce Department weighed in on how Anthropic's models can be distributed, and Anthropic's most advanced models disappeared from the market for three weeks in June due to an export control directive — not an outage or a pricing change.

Lewis Carhart, CEO of Comp AI, called the situation deeply troubling for enterprise IT. "We now have a de facto licensing regime that legally doesn't exist," he said. "There's no statute, no appeal process, no published criteria. Just Commerce deciding model by model what ships and when."

Jason Andersen, principal analyst at Moor Insights& Strategy, described the back-and-forth as "a bit of pageantry," suggesting OpenAI needs to project its models as frontier-level to remain competitive with Anthropic while burnishing its image as a responsible developer.

Brian Jackson of Info-Tech Research Group warned of an unintended consequence: organizations are now looking more seriously at non-US vendors for their AI strategies. Chinese open-source models and alternatives from Canada and Europe are being evaluated as enterprises seek to maintain control over their AI supply chain.

Carhart cautioned that model availability is now "a regulatory variable" not driven by the vendor roadmap, making multi-model resilience a board-level risk item rather than a nice-to-have architectural consideration.