Last week we suggested that access to US frontier models had become a political decision. This week GPT-5.6 did not launch to the public. It arrived as a US-only preview to around 20 American companies, each preapproved by the government, after Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick rang Sam Altman to confirm every relevant agency had signed off.
OpenAI calls GPT-5.6 Sol a next-generation model with a broad step change in capability, and it spent over 700,000 GPU hours on automated red-teaming, hunting universal jailbreaks, before showing it to anyone. The specific theme at release is cyber. In testing, Sol found real software vulnerabilities and built exploitation primitives against Chromium and Firefox, the engines behind most of the world's browsers. OpenAI's own line is that the model is better at helping people find and fix vulnerabilities than at reliably carrying out end-to-end attacks, and that it does not cross the cyber critical threshold.
But that dual-use quality is exactly why this is a futile argument. As we stated last week, the capability that patches a vulnerability is the capability that finds it, and a grading rubric cannot separate them because they are not separate. It now feels much more like the government has got a taste for inserting itself into the launch process of frontier AI and is not going to let go.
Shortly after the Sol announcement, Lutnick lifted the two-week-old block on Anthropic's Claude Mythos 5, the model his own department had forced offline worldwide in June. The reprieve was not a pardon: access would reach only the "certain trusted partners" he personally judged safe, he wrote to Anthropic. A cabinet secretary now personally determines which model reaches which institutions, by name.
“I have determined that appropriate safeguards are in place to permit certain trusted partners to access the Claude Mythos 5 Model.”
Altman is putting on a diplomatic face, but the discomfort is clear. He told staff this is "not our preferred long term model", and while he conceded publicly that extensive safety testing "is not a bad idea", he drew the line clearly: "I just don't like the idea of the government picking the customers". He has every reason to be nervous, because he is now handing the launch of his most valuable product to an administration that is not afraid to reward its political allies.
Having taken a taste for controlling the frontier, the obvious next move is the open models themselves. They cannot delete GLM 5.2 from the internet, but they can forbid US firms, cloud platforms and US inference providers from hosting or serving it, much as they already reached for export-control law to switch Mythos off. That would not dent the model's global availability for a second. It would simply wall American developers off from the cheapest, fastest tools on the market while the rest of the world keeps using them. GLM 5.2 has arrived as the DeepSeek moment of 2026, open-weight, benchmarked above some of Google's best, priced at a fraction of Western tiers, with no annex and no off-switch. The data, charted by Exponential View from OpenRouter, shows where demand has already gone, US models down from roughly 72% of routed tokens a year ago to around 33% now.
At the moment China hands the world a free frontier, the US is letting a government known for rewarding its friends and punishing its enemies decide who may use the American alternatives.
Takeaways: GPT-5.6 Sol looks powerful, likely a match for Fable, and that has given Washington the excuse to take control. The genuine cyber risk is the cover, not the cause. What began as a one-off vendetta over a jailbreak has hardened in a fortnight into a permit regime, where a cabinet secretary decides by name which model reaches which firm, and two of the three leading labs already operate inside it. We have watched this administration treat power as a personal lever before, wielding tariffs deal by deal until the Supreme Court took the tool away. A discretionary gate over AI access invites exactly the same abuse from a government practised at rewarding friends. But as with tariffs it may be the US that ends up paying the price.