Previewing GPT-5.6 Sol: a next-generation model

We’re beginning a limited preview of the GPT‑5.6 series: Sol, our flagship model; Terra, a balanced model for everyday work; and Luna, a fast and affordable model. Terra has competitive performance to GPT‑5.5 while being 2x cheaper and Luna brings strong capability at our lowest cost.

GPT‑5.6 Sol launches with our most robust safety stack to date. We strengthened protections for higher-risk activity, sensitive cyber requests, and repeated misuse, and spent multiple weeks finding weaknesses, pressure-testing our system, and hardening it against real-world attacks.

We believe in broad access, and we plan to make GPT‑5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna generally available in the coming weeks. As part of our ongoing engagement with the U.S. government, we previewed our plans and the models’ capabilities ahead of today’s launch. At their request, we are starting with a limited preview for a small group of trusted partners whose participation has been shared with the government, before releasing more broadly. During this preview, we will continue testing and coordinating closely with partners as we work toward broader availability. We don’t believe this kind of government access process should become the long-term default. It keeps the best tools from users, developers, enterprises, cyber defenders, and global partners who need them. We are taking this short-term step because we believe it is the strongest path to broader availability in the coming weeks, while we work with the Administration to develop the cyber Executive Order framework and a repeatable process for future model releases.

GPT‑5.6 is priced per 1M tokens across three model sizes: Sol is $5 input / $30 output; Terra is $2.50 input / $15 output; and Luna is $1 input / $6 output. GPT‑5.6 also introduces more predictable prompt caching, including support for explicit cache breakpoints and a 30-minute minimum cache life. For GPT‑5.6 and later models, cache writes are billed at 1.25x the model’s uncached input rate, while cache reads continue to receive the 90% cached-input discount.

We’re also launching GPT‑5.6 Sol on Cerebras at up to 750 tokens per second in July, bringing frontier intelligence to customers at unprecedented speed. Access will initially be limited to select customers as we expand capacity.

We developed GPT‑5.6 Sol, Terra and Luna with our most robust safeguards to date, with configurations matched to each model’s capabilities. As the model becomes more capable, we design safeguards to increasingly hold up to real-world adversarial pressure while preserving access to legitimate work such as code review, vulnerability research, patch development, debugging, security education, and defensive testing. Our goal is to make prohibited offensive activity more difficult, uncertain, and detectable without unnecessarily limiting those beneficial uses. Based on our assessment of the model and safeguards, we expect substantial benefit for legitimate defensive work, while meaningfully constraining prohibited offensive use.

No single safeguard is sufficient against determined or adaptive misuse. Across the GPT‑5.6 preview, we use layered safeguards, with exact configurations varying across models, and pressure-test them for real-world attacks. These include protections trained into the model, real-time checks during generation, account-level signals, differentiated access, monitoring, enforcement, and continued testing.

No evaluation can represent every product configuration, multi-step attack, or real-world workflow. We therefore maintain a rapid-response process to reproduce, assess, prioritize, and remediate newly discovered jailbreaks, then add them to our ongoing evaluations so we can test against similar failures in the future.

GPT‑5.6 Sol is our strongest model yet. To give a preview of model performance, we share a set of evaluations highlighting improved agentic capabilities in coding, biology, and cybersecurity, with additional safety and preparedness evaluations available in our system card ⁠ (opens in a new window) . We will share an expanded suite of evaluation results when we make the model broadly available.

With GPT‑5.6, we’re introducing a new max reasoning effort to give Sol the most time to reason deeply. Additionally, we’re introducing a new ultra mode that goes beyond the capabilities of a single agent by leveraging subagents to accelerate complex work.

For coding workflows, GPT‑5.6 Sol sets a new state of the art on Terminal‑Bench 2.1 , which tests command-line workflows requiring planning, iteration, and tool coordination.