GPT-5.6

The announcement is thin — Ultra reportedly uses subagents to go beyond a single agent. The thread fills with access logistics and a guess that Pro-tier already runs ~12 parallel agents synthesized into one answer.

The reversal is a corporate weather report: praise for the biggest token users flipped to weekly emails begging for restraint — arriving just as OpenAI reportedly found a way to halve inference cost.

OpenAI's own launch note says GPT-5.6 begins life as a limited preview for vetted partners, with names handed to the U.S. government before anyone else gets access. The implication landed harder than the model did: a private company now needs federal sign-off on its customer list.

Commenters reached for the precedent that already exists — ITAR and export-controlled software — while others noted the labs spent a year lobbying for exactly this kind of oversight, and got it pointed straight back at them.

GPT-5.6 ships in three sizes — Sol ($5/$30), Terra ($2.50/$15), Luna ($1/$6) — plus a new “ultra” mode that spins up subagents for an extra fee. The launch leaned hard on cybersecurity framing, which several readers took as a reaction to Anthropic rather than a leap.

The hottest sub-thread wasn't about capability at all. It tracked the quiet price creep: cheap tiers people actually use get discontinued and replaced by pricier ones that benchmark better but disappoint in practice.