OpenAI launches its new family of models with GPT-5.6

OpenAI launches its new family of models with GPT-5.6
OpenAI's latest family of models promises improvements across a range of areas, including cybersecurity.

<p id="speakable-summary" class="wp-block-paragraph">OpenAI unveiled its newest family of models on Thursday, introducing a set of heavyweight programs into an increasingly crowded field of AI offerings.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">GPT-5.6 comes in three variants: Sol (considered its workhorse), Terra (a more intermediate option), and Luna (its budget-friendly option). These models expand what users can do across a variety of fields — with the company promising powerful capabilities in enterprise work, coding, and even scientific research.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">CEO Sam Altman has promised that his company’s newest models are orders of magnitude more efficient and cost-effective than previous versions, recently <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/09/open-ai-sam-altman-chatgpt-5-6-sol.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener nofollow">telling CNBC</a> that Sol is 54% more token efficient when it comes to AI coding tasks.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Most notably, the company calls 5.6 its “strongest cybersecurity model yet, achieving frontier performance with significantly fewer tokens.” </p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Indeed, much hubbub has been made about the model’s cyber capabilities, as the Trump administration previously <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/26/openai-limits-gpt-5-6-rollout-after-government-request-says-restrictions-shouldnt-be-the-norm/">sought to restrict its rollout</a>, ostensibly due to fears of how the model could be misused. GPT-5.6 supports defensive activities, including threat modeling, code review and patching, and blue teaming (simulating an attack on your own systems to find weaknesses before real hackers do).</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">OpenAI also released a new tool called <a href="https://openai.com/chatgpt-work/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener nofollow">ChatGPT Work</a>, which — just as it sounds — is designed as a workplace companion for enterprise teams, running on desktop, web, and mobile, that can help with daily clerical tasks, like drafting documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">OpenAI’s newly announced family of models follows on the heels of similar releases this week from competitors SpaceXAI and Meta.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">However, GPT-5.6 and its attendant marketing seems most designed to take aim at OpenAI’s primary opponent, Anthropic. Anthropic has managed to make itself the <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/12/at-the-humanx-conference-everyone-was-talking-about-claude/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">likable underdog</a> of the AI race, focusing fixedly on enterprise customers and winning a growing share of support as a result.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Not to be outdone, OpenAI cites the <a href="https://artificialanalysis.ai/agents/coding-agents" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener nofollow">Artificial Analysis Coding Agent Index</a>, a notable benchmarking metric, to claim that its latest family of models outshines Anthropic’s models at every turn.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">OpenAI calls Sol its “best coding model yet,” and has explicitly compared it to Anthropic’s <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/09/anthropics-claude-fable-5-is-a-version-of-mythos-the-public-can-access-today/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">recently released (and much hyped) Fable</a>. Using the Coding Agent Index, OpenAI claims that Sol “sets a new state of the art at 80, 2.8 points above Fable 5, while using less than half the output tokens, taking less than half the time, and costing about one-third less.”</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">It adds: “That advantage extends across the family: Terra performs just above Fable 5, while Luna outperforms Opus 4.8.” </p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The company says that 5.6 is now available across ChatGPT, Codex, and the OpenAI API. Availability per million tokens is priced as follows: Sol is $5 input / $30 output, Terra is $2.50 input / $15 output, and Luna is $1 input / $6 output.</p>