OpenAI launches its new family of models with GPT-5.6
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- OpenAI unveiled GPT-5.6 on Thursday in three variants—Sol (workhorse), Terra (intermediate), and Luna (budget)—targeting enterprise work, coding, and scientific research.
- Sam Altman told CNBC that Sol is 54% more token-efficient on AI coding tasks than prior models.
- OpenAI calls GPT-5.6 its "strongest cybersecurity model yet," supporting threat modeling, code review, patching, and blue teaming.
- The Trump administration previously sought to restrict GPT-5.6's rollout over concerns the model could be misused, a backstory the launch does not address.
- OpenAI claims Sol scored 80 on the Artificial Analysis Coding Agent Index—2.8 points above Anthropic's Fable 5—while using less than half the output tokens, taking less than half the time, and costing about one-third less.
- OpenAI also launched ChatGPT Work, a desktop, web, and mobile enterprise companion for drafting documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.
- GPT-5.6 is priced at $5/$30 (Sol), $2.50/$15 (Terra), and $1/$6 (Luna) per million input/output tokens and is available across ChatGPT, Codex, and the OpenAI API.
Why it matters: OpenAI is directly challenging Anthropic's enterprise and coding-agent lead, claiming Sol beats Fable 5 by 2.8 points on the Coding Agent Index at roughly one-third the cost—pressuring Anthropic's premium pricing while OpenAI simultaneously pushes into productivity software with ChatGPT Work and lands a cyber-focused model that survived a Trump-era restriction push.
