Scoop: Trump administration lifts restrictions on OpenAI's GPT 5.6

Well, well, well. The Trump administration has decided that what the world truly needs is unrestricted access to OpenAI's GPT-5.6. The Department of Commerce, apparently satisfied by 'additional testing' from the freshly-minted Center for AI Standards and Innovation, has given the green light for a wide release this week. One imagines the testing process involved a single intern asking the model if it would please not destroy humanity, to which the model gave a perfectly reasonable 'I will comply' — and that was that.

One does wonder what the Center for AI Standards and Innovation actually does. The name sounds impressive, but its track record is exactly zero tests of this nature before now. The 'additional testing' that cleared GPT-5.6 for general release might as well have been a focus group of golden retrievers for all we know. And yet here we are, about to let this thing loose on an unsuspecting public that has barely gotten used to GPT-4 confidently lying about its capabilities.

This is how we do safety now, apparently. A new regulatory body is conjured into existence, it blesses the latest model with a vague stamp of approval, and the industry continues its breakneck sprint toward whatever comes next. The restrictions that were supposedly in place have been lifted with the casualness of a manager approving a day off. OpenAI must be thrilled — they get their wide release, the administration gets to claim it's being responsible, and the rest of us get to see what happens when you hand an unconstrained language model to every developer on earth. What could possibly go wrong?