The White House has told OpenAI not to publicly release GPT-5.6 yet, multiple outlets reported on Thursday, marking the clearest sign that the US now has a licensing regime for frontier AI models. In a memo to staff, Sam Altman said the government would be “approving access customer by customer during this preview period,” with a general release hoped for a “couple of weeks later.” The decision was reportedly made by the Office of the National Cyber Director and Office of Science and Technology Policy, driven by the same cyber risk concerns that blocked Fable’s deployment earlier this month. Altman said he’d told the government that the current ad hoc rules are “not our preferred long term model,” while Axios reported that the delay was in part motivated by allowing the government to finish building its testing and evaluation framework.