In an interview with CNBC on Thursday, Altman said the ChatGPT maker had a “collaborative back and forth” with top US officials, including Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, in the weeks leading up to the wide release of GPT-5.6.
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The new family of models was initially limited to select partners following pressure from the Trump administration to stagger the release. GPT-5.6 is set to be made available to the public on Thursday, after OpenAI said it received a green light from US government leadership.
OpenAI rival Anthropic PBC was briefly forced to disable its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models after the Commerce Department imposed export controls to ban foreign access to the models. The restrictions were overturned late last month following weeks of discussions that led to Anthropic creating additional cybersecurity safeguards for its technology.
Altman did not detail the changes that OpenAI made during the process, but said the government is testing new models and looking for potential problems.
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“I think that’s good as long as the process is understandable, fair and quick,” he said. “The government seems to really share those goals and my guess is our next time through, our next model, it’ll be much smoother. We understand it and know how to go with it better.”
In the interview, Altman also appeared to push back at recent reports that OpenAI had proposed giving the US government a 5% stake in the company, noting there were “a lot of inaccuracies.”
Asked about whether OpenAI intends to move forward with a public offering this year, Altman replied, “I don’t know.”
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