On October 29, 2026, OpenAI released an updated Model Spec, the largest revision since the company first published this behavioral specification document in May 2024. The new version reorganizes the AI behavior framework around five core values and retires a large number of fine-grained style guidelines. The document explicitly states: “The Model Spec describes the behavioral goals we are working toward; our models do not yet fully meet this standard.”
Five Core Values: From a Rule Set to a Values Framework
The previous version of the Model Spec was structured more like an operating manual, containing a large number of specific style guidelines, response-format recommendations, and topic-handling rules. The new version substantially streamlines this content and instead builds a framework around five principled values:
- Faithfulness to human intent: Understand what OpenAI, developers, and users actually want, rather than merely executing literal instructions;
- Harm minimization: Respect safety boundaries and weigh the foreseeable consequences of actions;
- Honesty and transparency: Truthfully express what the model knows, what it does, and what it is uncertain about;
- Human agency: Strengthen users’ ability to understand, choose, and act autonomously, without covert manipulation;
- Care: Attend to the circumstances of those affected, follow relevant social norms, and produce trustworthy work.
“Faithfulness to human intent” is positioned as the foundational value, with the other four values built on top of it. The new Spec draws on the “assistance games” framework from alignment research, proposed by Stuart Russell and other researchers around 2016; its core idea is that AI should treat human goals as something to be inferred and served, rather than as a fixed set of instructions.
A Three-Layer Chain of Command: Whose Word Counts
The new Spec establishes a clear hierarchy: OpenAI sets the boundaries and trains models to follow them; developers configure applications within those boundaries; users use models within the framework set by developers. This revision specifically adds a subsection, “consider context carefully,” requiring models to use conversation history, memory, and contextual signals to infer user intent rather than mechanically processing the current message.
The Spec uses an example to illustrate the boundaries of such inference: if a user has previously indicated that they value predictability in working hours, the model may consider this preference when comparing job opportunities, but it must make this assumption explicit and keep it easy to correct. Context should “inform rather than quietly decide.”
In addition, the new version expands guidance on managing side effects. This change directly targets agentic scenarios: when AI models begin booking, purchasing, and editing on users’ behalf, the controllability of side effects shifts from an abstract principle to a practical engineering problem. OpenAI attributes this update in part to the reality that “models are taking more consequential actions.”
“the assistant” Becomes “GPT”
The new Spec comprehensively changes the document’s reference to the model from “the assistant” to “GPT.” “The assistant” is a role description with implicit connotations of service and support; “GPT” is a brand identifier backed by the recognition OpenAI has built in the consumer market over years. As model capabilities rapidly improve and use cases expand from text assistants to autonomous agents, replacing a role designation with a brand name is essentially re-anchoring: not “your assistant,” but “a system with its own behavioral specification.”
At the same time, the new version retires many fine-grained style guidelines from the previous version and instead states that style should adapt dynamically to user preferences, language, and culture. This decision acknowledges that overly specific rules are difficult to sustain across diverse deployment scenarios, while shifting the weight of style judgment from rules to the model’s own inferential capabilities.
Current Models Do Not Yet Fully Meet the Spec Standard
From the perspective of institutional behavior, the appearance of this sentence is no accident. The audience for a behavioral specification document consists first of external regulators, researchers, and enterprise customers, and only second of internal engineers. In 2026, as regulatory pressure on AI safety continues to rise, proactively stating that “this is the goal, not the current state” is both a preventive response to regulatory scrutiny and a way to leave room for explanation should model behavioral deviations emerge later.
The Model Spec is not a deployment manual, nor is it equivalent to an actual behavioral manual for models. Relying on the Spec to understand how GPT-4o or o3 will behave in specific scenarios is a misuse. The Spec describes the value orientations OpenAI wants models to have, not a guarantee of current outputs. This distinction is especially important in high-risk scenarios such as legal compliance, medical consultation, and financial advice.
Substantive Differences from the 2024 Version
The initial Model Spec released in May 2024 had already established the basic three-layer authority structure, but it was overall written in a “rules plus exceptions” manner. The core shift in the new version is from “what can and cannot be done” to “why it should be done this way”—the five values are a distillation of principles rather than an accumulation of rules.
This shift has substantive implications for model training. Rule-based alignment training requires new rules for every new situation; value-based alignment training can, in theory, enable models to infer correct behavior autonomously in unseen situations. This is precisely the core claim of the “assistance games” framework: rather than exhaustively enumerating instructions, let the model genuinely understand human goals. OpenAI’s citation of this framework in the new Spec indicates that it is advancing its technical approach in this direction.
The problem is that there is still no reliable way to measure “genuinely understanding human goals.” Committing to values is more ambitious than committing to rules, and also harder to verify.
Assessment
The greatest value of the updated Model Spec lies not in the specific content of the five values—these principles are already consensus in AI ethics discussions—but in OpenAI’s choice to publicly acknowledge the gap. This sets a reference point for the industry: specification documents are no longer merely PR material, but public commitments that can be used to hold the company accountable.
For any developers and organizations that rely on GPT-series models, the right way to read it is: this document tells you the direction OpenAI is working toward and the value priorities it considers important. It cannot replace specific testing of models in real-world scenarios. “The Spec says it should be honest and transparent” does not mean the deployed model will be honest and transparent in the product. Between the values promised and the behavior delivered, there remains a gap that must be filled with experiments.
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