On 2026-06-26, OpenAI began a limited preview of GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna, with the customer list for the flagship Sol preview coordinated with the US government; the same day, the Commerce Department lifted its two-week-old export block on Anthropic's Claude Mythos 5 via a letter from Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, releasing it to "more than 100 US institutions" under an Annex A. The two actions together establish a new distribution model in which each new customer of a US frontier lab's most capable model is, in practice, approved by the Trump administration's Commerce Department, with no published criteria, no public rule, and an explicit acknowledgement that "the framework for overseeing AI is being built on the fly." OpenAI, in its announcement, is publicly unhappy: "We don't believe this kind of government access process should become the long-term default." Semafor, the Washington Post, and the OpenAI announcement are the three load-bearing primary sources.
The US government is now a customer gatekeeper for both OpenAI and Anthropic's frontier models: GPT-5.6 Sol and Claude Mythos 5 ship under the same Commerce Department vetting regime