OpenAI said in a Friday blog post announcing its latest artificial intelligence model, GPT-5.6, that the government would initially approve who gets access to the new release while AI companies and the administration work out a longer-term plan for regulation on the sector.

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The latest moves underline rapid changes in the Trump administration’s AI policy. President Donald Trump returned to office promising a hands-off approach to the industry and decried attempts by the Biden administration to create safety standards for new AI models. But after the recent appearance of systems capable of finding security vulnerabilities in software spooked officials in Washington and around the world, the White House changed its position.

“In a matter of weeks, U.S. federal AI policy has gone from implausibly libertarian to increasingly draconian and opaque,” Dean Ball, a former Trump AI adviser, wrote in a social media post Friday. Ball announced last week he will join OpenAI next month to work on policy.

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OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman made clear that he did not welcome the additional federal oversight. “I just dont like the idea of the government picking the customers,” he wrote Friday in a post on X. “Confident we will get to a better place.”

An OpenAI blog post on the arrangement said: “We don’t believe this kind of government access process should become the long-term default. It keeps the best tools from users, developers, enterprises, cyber defenders, and global partners who need them.”

“We are taking this short-term step because we believe it is the strongest path to broader availability in the coming weeks,” the blog post said.

OpenAI said that Sol was its most powerful AI model yet and showed improvements in coding and cybersecurity tasks. Only companies approved by the government will get access. There is no process for individual users to get access to the new model. (The Post has a content partnership with OpenAI.)

The administration signed off on a list of companies OpenAI asked to be allowed access to Sol but excluded a handful of entities located outside of the United States, a White House official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to share nonpublic information. Another White House official said the government was working with AI labs to develop a long-term approach for addressing the challenges of getting the technology out to more users.