The White House has clarified that it did not give OpenAI a “green light” to release its latest AI models — and that no such permission is required. The statement came after an Axios report suggested that OpenAI had received approval from the Trump administration before making its GPT-5.6 models — Sol, Terra, and Luna — publicly available. “The Trump administration did NOT give OpenAI a ‘green light,’ approval, or clearance to release its models,” a White House spokesperson said per a Gizmodo report. “No such permission is required or granted. The administration does not provide approvals for private companies to release AI models — decisions on timing and scope of releases rest entirely with the companies,” the spokesperson added.
What triggered the confusion
OpenAI announced on Tuesday that all three models — GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna — will be publicly available starting Thursday, July 9. Axios reported, citing an anonymous source, that the decision to go public followed a “green light” from the Trump administration. The report said that the chatGPT-maker had been working with the Department of Commerce’s Center for AI Standards and Innovation to test the models for national security risks.
What the executive order actually said
In an executive order published on June 2, President Trump proposed a voluntary safety testing framework. Under the framework, AI companies would give federal officials access to new models for 30 days before a public release.However, the order also stated the framework would under no circumstance include “a mandatory governmental licensing, preclearance, or permitting requirement for the development, publication, release, or distribution of new AI models, including frontier models.”In other words, cooperation with the government is voluntary — not a legal requirement.OpenAI then said it has previewed its plans and the models’ capabilities to the US government ahead of the launch. At the government’s request, it began with a limited preview for a small group of trusted partners before a broader release. Last month, the Department of Commerce ordered Anthropic to block access for all foreign persons to its newest models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, citing national security concerns. The order forced Anthropic to take both models offline for all customers and drew widespread confusion from cybersecurity and legal experts. When Anthropic later released a modified version of Fable 5 — with more restrictive cybersecurity guardrails — the company said its own internal testing showed the capabilities that had prompted the export ban could also be demonstrated by other already available models, including earlier versions of Claude and OpenAI’s GPT-5.5.
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