ITAR

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.

Thompson traces a pattern: Mythos withheld as too dangerous in April, Fable released with guardrails in June and promptly jailbroken, then both gated under ITAR export controls. Safety, he argues, conveniently aligns with talent, mission, and business.

The sharpest rebuttal in the thread: you can't be on your way to 'power over everything' and get distilled into free Chinese models within months. Pick one. The bottleneck is compute and data, not the model.