OpenAI unveiled its new family of models on Thursday, introducing a number of heavyweight programs to an increasingly crowded field of artificial intelligence offerings.
The GPT-5.6 comes in three variants: Sol (considered its workhorse), Terra (a more mid-range option) and Luna (its budget-friendly option). These models expand what users can do in a variety of fields — with the company promising strong capabilities in enterprise work, coding, and even scientific research.
CEO Sam Altman promised that his company’s newest models are orders of magnitude more efficient and economical than previous versions, recently he tells CNBC that Sol is 54% more token efficient when it comes to AI coding tasks.
Most notably, the company calls 5.6 “the strongest cybersecurity model to date, achieving peak performance with significantly fewer tokens.”
Indeed, much ado has been made about the model’s cyber potential, with the Trump administration previously trying to restrict its release, ostensibly over fears of how the model could be abused. 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).
OpenAI has also released a new tool called ChatGPT Workwhich—as it sounds—is designed as a workplace companion for enterprise teams, running on desktop, web and mobile, that can help with everyday office tasks such as writing documents, spreadsheets and presentations.
OpenAI’s recently announced family of models follows similar releases this week from competitors SpaceXAI and Meta.
However, GPT-5.6 and its subsequent marketing appear to be designed more to target OpenAI’s main rival, Anthropic. Anthropic has managed to become the likable underdog of the AI race, focusing firmly on enterprise customers and winning a growing share of support as a result.
Not to be outdone, OpenAI reports the Artificial Analysis Coding Factor Indexa remarkable benchmarking metric to claim that its latest model family outperforms Anthropic’s models at every turn.
OpenAI calls Sol the “best coding model” and has explicitly compared it to Anthropic’s recent (and much-hyped) Fable. 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 a third less.”
He adds: “This advantage extends across the family: Terra outperforms just above Fable 5, while Luna outperforms Opus 4.8.”
The company says 5.6 is now available in ChatGPT, Codex, and the OpenAI API. Availability per million tokens is priced as follows: Sol is $5 entry / $30 exit, Terra is $2.50 entry / $15 exit, and Luna is $1 entry / $6 exit.
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