OpenAI Launches GPT-5.6: Trio of Advanced AI Models Now Available to the Public
On July 9, 2026, OpenAI made a significant stride in the AI landscape by publicly releasing the highly anticipated GPT-5.6 model family. This family consists of three tiers named Sol, Terra, and Luna. These models are now available to users worldwide across various platforms including ChatGPT, Codex, ChatGPT Work, and the OpenAI API.
Prior to this public release, there was a two-week government-gated preview starting from June 26. During this period, access was restricted to approximately 20 pre-approved partner organizations. This was while the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI) conducted safety evaluations. The trigger for this scrutiny was the formidable capabilities of GPT-5.6 Sol in cybersecurity, biology, and chemistry — fields where advanced AI poses dual-use risks.
GPT-5.6 Sol, the flagship tier, has set new state-of-the-art benchmarks. This includes a 91.9% score on Terminal-Bench 2.1 (in its Sol Ultra variant) and top results across SecureBio evaluations. Terra offers competitive performance at roughly half the cost of GPT-5.5, while Luna provides the fastest and most affordable option. All three models share a massive 1.05 million token context window and 128K max output. API pricing starts at $1/$6 per million tokens for Luna, and goes up to $5/$30 for Sol.
The rollout also marked the debut of ChatGPT Work, a new collaborative workspace surface. Additionally, it saw the integration of Codex into the ChatGPT desktop app for both macOS and Windows.
Source: Nextgov/FCW — OpenAI’s advanced GPT-5.6 models to be publicly released