OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told CNBC on Thursday that GPT-5.6 Sol, the company’s latest artificial intelligence model, is 54% more token efficient on agentic coding tasks, and that it’s “as good or better” than competing models on the market.
“Every enterprise now is thinking about spend and the value they’re getting in exchange for AI, and this is what we really want to do,” Altman said.
OpenAI on Thursday is rolling out its latest series of models, GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra and Luna, which it announced last month. The company limited the initial launch to a “small group of trusted partners” at the request of the U.S. government.
Altman said the company worked with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and U.S. National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross on the approval process. He described OpenAI’s work with the government as a “collaborative back and forth,” where the government would carry out tests and raise problems for the company to address.
“If you want broad access, which we do, and you have powerful models, you really want to be able to be confident in your safety claims, because otherwise the world is going to get uncomfortable very fast,” Altman said.
OpenAI is in preliminary and ongoing talks with the Trump administration about a possible stake in the company, as CNBC previously reported. It has proposed giving the government a 5% holding, according to a report from the Financial Times, but Altman said there are “a lot of inaccuracies there.”
Altman said he hopes the regulatory approach will be global and that people will be able to use AI without having to think about safety.
“Everybody will get access,” he said. “It’s not like the U.S. is going to disproportionately benefit here.”
OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit research company in 2015, and it rocketed into the mainstream with the launch of its ChatGPT chatbot in 2022. The company, which is now valued at $852 billion by private investors, kickstarted a sprint for AI dominance among rivals including Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta and Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
Meta unveiled its latest AI model, Muse Spark 1.1, on Thursday, which it said is its “strongest model for agentic and coding work yet.” SpaceX, which acquired Musk’s AI startup xAI earlier this year, launched a new model called Grok 4.5 on Wednesday.
SpaceX pulled off the largest IPO on record last month, and OpenAI and Anthropic are also gearing up for potentially massive public markets debuts. Both companies have confidentially filed their prospectuses with regulators, but they have not disclosed official plans or timelines.
Altman stayed mum about whether OpenAI will IPO this year.
“I don’t know,” he said.
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