OpenAI released GPT-5.6 in July, after Sam Altman stated that his company made ‘many changes’ during discussions with the Trump administration. In interviews with CNBC on July 9, Altman described a ‘collaborative back-and-forth’ with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent before the model became public.
GPT-5.6 has a significantly lower price than competing models: $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens, compared to $5 and $25 for Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.8. The model includes a 500,000-token context window and improved reasoning over previous versions.
The equity stake proposal
Altman separately proposed giving 5% of OpenAI’s equity to a US sovereign wealth fund — which amounts to about $320 per American family at the current valuation. The idea addresses two concerns: that AI companies profit from human-generated training data without compensation, and that AI could trigger a collapse in the labor market.
This move appears designed to preempt government regulation and build political goodwill. It also signals OpenAI’s confidence in its valuation and trajectory.
The push for a global framework
In an op-ed in the Financial Times, Altman called for ‘a US-led international forum that establishes accepted standards, provides expert and impartial analysis of capabilities and risks.’ He cited aviation safety, global financial standards, and the International Atomic Energy Agency as models for AI governance.
The timing is intentional. Altman is positioning OpenAI as the responsible actor in AI development, while competitors like Google and Anthropic expand their market share. The meetings with the government, the equity proposal, and the governance rhetoric form a coordinated play for legitimacy and protection from regulation.
GPT-5.6 is already available on the OpenAI platform, both via API and ChatGPT Plus.
According to inews.zoombangla.com, Altman’s strategy reflects a calculated move to shape the future of AI regulation in the United States, while offering symbolic compensation to the population for the use of public data.