GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra & Luna Launch Globally After Government Review

OpenAI released its GPT-5.6 family to all users worldwide on July 9, 2026, following a government-requested security review delay. The three models cover different capability and cost profiles for different tasks.

Key Points:

• Sol is the flagship model with the highest reasoning power, priced at approximately $5/$30 per million tokens, designed for complex enterprise reasoning and security-sensitive workloads.

• Terra is the balanced everyday model at $2.50/$15 per million tokens—GPT-5.5-class performance at half the cost, optimized for knowledge work and most professional tasks.

• Luna is the fast, affordable tier at $1/$6 per million tokens, built for high-volume applications where speed matters more than depth.

• The launch followed a pre-release security review under the June 2026 Executive Order framework—establishing a precedent for government-gated AI releases.

• All three variants include a 1.5 million token context window, enabling long-document analysis and complex multi-step agentic workflows. In plain terms: a token is roughly three-quarters of a word. A 1.5 million token window means the model can hold roughly 1.1 million words of context—about 10 full novels—in a single conversation.

• Sol scored 88.8% on standardized reasoning benchmarks; Terra 84.3%; Luna 82.5%—all at or above the previous GPT-5.5 baseline of 83.4%.

Budget-conscious organizations can now route most tasks to Terra or Luna and escalate only complex reasoning to Sol—a meaningful cost optimization for high-volume AI use. The government vetting precedent means future model launches from any major lab may come with access delays—enterprise continuity plans must account for this.

Why It Matters: Three-tier pricing lets organizations cut AI costs by 40-60% by routing tasks intentionally. The government security review establishes a new template that will affect every frontier model launch going forward.