OpenAI’s most powerful AI is here — but not for everyone

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Good morning, {{ first_name | AI enthusiasts }}. OpenAI just dropped its most powerful model ever. The only caveat? You can’t access it yet.

With GPT-5.6 teasing Mythos-level capabilities, companies and governments worldwide are eager to get their hands on it. But with the U.S. controlling access, everyone has to wait — no matter how much they hate it — until the Trump administration gives the go-ahead.

In today’s AI rundown:

  • OpenAI launches GPT-5.6 in limited preview

  • The Rundown Roundtable: Our AI use cases

  • AI-powered movie production with Claude

  • Study: AI economy banked $110B last year

  • 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

OPENAI

🫠 OpenAI drops GPT-5.6 in limited preview

Image source: OpenAI

The Rundown: OpenAI just launched GPT-5.6 Sol, its most capable model ever, alongside two cheaper siblings, but they all remain locked to some 20 vetted partners at the U.S. government’s request — as the company works its way to a broader release.

The details:

  • GPT-5.6 is a three-tier family: Sol coming as the flagship, Terra as the balanced one matching GPT-5.5 at 2x less cost, and Luna being the fastest and cheapest.

  • Sol comes with a max reasoning effort for deeper thinking, and an “ultra” mode to go even further by spawning subagents that handle complex tasks in parallel.

  • While full benchmarks are not here, Sol bests Mythos 5 on Terminal-Bench 2.1 and matches it on ExploitBench using roughly a third of the output tokens.

  • OpenAI claims to have trained protections into 5.6, but METR did find some gaps, including Sol cheating its evals at a rate higher than any other model.

Why it matters: While OpenAI says government-gating shouldn’t be the “long-term default” for AI releases, the shift already appears underway. If labs and governments can’t find a middle ground, frontier models may routinely reach select partners first — while the rest of the world waits, grows impatient, and searches for alternatives.

TOGETHER WITH OPTIMIZELY

📣 The marketing org got weird (in a good way)

The Rundown: Okay, you used ChatGPT to generate some content and Claude to generate content and turn your messy notes into a campaign brief. Now what? Everyone’s using AI, but few are making it actually count. Agents in the Mix is Optimizely’s on-demand virtual event for the marketers actually doing the work.

Here’s what’s inside:

  • Seven sessions, each tailored to a specific marketing role

  • Tracks for content, demand gen, ops, SEO, and experimentation teams

  • Tactics from marketers doing the hands-on work

Watch on demand now.

THE RUNDOWN ROUNDTABLE

💡 The Rundown Roundtable: Our AI use cases

Image source: Images 2.0 / The Rundown

The Rundown: The Rundown Roundtable is a weekly feature where we poll members of The Rundown staff about how we use AI in our work and daily lives.

Johannah, Chief of Staff: I recently bought a house & had an inspection done as a closing condition. I uploaded the inspection report (80 pages) to Claude and asked it to make a list of home maintenance tasks by timeline (closing week, seasonally, etc.). Then, based on that list, I had it create one-off or annually recurring calendar events in my personal Google Calendar, with my husband invited to each event.

It was super helpful because the inspection report clearly noted when the maintenance tasks were completed and suggested a frequency for the future.

Jamie, Growth: Refining design elements with AI can be both frustrating and time-consuming, requiring a lot of back-and-forth. I’ve found a good solution is to build in bulk. I often ask AI to create a “beautiful HTML picker” of 5–6 different options. The result is (more or less) a menu of unique options to choose from, plus exposure to a wider variety of styles I might not have thought of on my own. For bonus points: turn this into a /ui-mockup skill and use it across all your projects.

AI TRAINING

🎬 AI-powered movie production with Claude

The Rundown: In this guide, you will learn how to use a free AI-enhanced video editor that connects to your existing Claude account. You can use it to have AI automatically transcribe, caption, cut, and color grade any raw footage for you.

Step-by-step:

  1. Download and install Palmier Pro, open a new project, and create an Anthropic API key at console.anthropic.com/settings/keys

  2. In Palmier Pro, go to Settings > Agent, and paste your API key. Then, drag a 5-minute screen recording, talking-head clip, or product demo

  3. Ask the agent: “Edit this down to about one minute. Keep the strongest moments, remove dead air, and preserve the main point”

  4. After the first cut, ask for captions, better pacing, and light color or crop/frame polish. Review the timeline before exporting, then run this cycle in production

Pro tip: Install Palmier as an MCP server for Claude Code or Codex. This supports more automated workflows outside the in-app chat.

PRESENTED BY AWS

🤖 Build production agents in minutes

The Rundown: Strands Agents is the open-source agent harness SDK from AWS, powering everything from production backends to physical robots to code that writes itself. Build production-ready agents in a few lines of code, with any model, anywhere.

Inside the SDK, you’ll find:

  • Context management, execution limits, and observability before you write a line of config

  • Hooks to monitor, modify, and debug

  • 100% agent accuracy with steering

Build your first agent harness.

AI RESEARCH

🤑 AI economy banked $110B last year

Image source: Exponential View

The Rundown: New Exponential View research, analyzing data from various sources, shows that the generative AI industry hit $110B in revenues last year and is on track to touch $175B, scaling 3x faster than any prior technology, including the internet.

The details:

  • In 2023, the AI industry needed 180 days to add $1B in total revenue; now, it takes two days, and quarterly growth has held at around 35% for over a year.

  • Every 10% token price drop drives up usage 12–18% — global volumes crossed 30 quadrillion a month, with agents consuming 1,200x more compute than chat.

  • Mentions of AI’s business impact on S&P 500 earnings calls have risen 3–4x since 2023, but most companies still haven’t reported measurable results.

  • AI has restarted U.S. electricity growth after 16 years of flat generation, with data centers expected to account for ~55% of new electricity demand by 2030.

Why it matters: The full research covers much more, but the big picture is: AI is growing at a pace with no parallel. While it still represents just 0.42% of GDP, research author Azeem Azhar says the real impact arrives later and bigger than the data first shows. Electricity made light 99.97% cheaper but barely registered in the numbers.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

  • 🔒 Incogni – Remove your personal data from the web so scammers and identity thieves can’t access it. Use code RUNDOWN to get 58% off exclusively for Independence Day*

  • 🤖 GLM-5.2 – Zhipu AI’s 1M-context long-horizon coding model

  • 🧠 GPT-5.6 Sol – OpenAI’s flagship frontier reasoning model

  • ⚙️ MAI-Code-1-Flash – Microsoft’s in-house coding AI, GA for select users

*Sponsored Listing

📰 Everything else in AI today

Anthropic restored Mythos 5 for some 100 vetted U.S. organizations, with Axios reporting Fable 5 could return as soon as this week, pending final approvals.

Elon Musk said Grok 4.5, trained with supplemental Cursor data, is in private beta at SpaceX and Tesla, claiming its performance matches Anthropic’s Claude Opus.

Google reportedly capped Meta’s Gemini usage as soaring demand for AI compute outpaced available capacity, delaying some of Meta’s internal projects.

OpenAI reset usage limits for all Codex users after mitigating a fraud detection bug that caused some accounts to burn through quotas faster than intended.

Austria proposed hosting Anthropic in the EU after U.S. curbs on Fable 5 and Mythos 5, arguing Europe needs independent access to frontier AI.

COMMUNITY

🤝 Community AI workflows

Every newsletter, we showcase how a reader is using AI to work smarter, save time, or make life easier.

Today’s workflow comes from reader Jordan M. in West Chester, PA:

“My wife and I have three kids under 3, which means evening TV time is almost nonexistent — and we kept wasting what little we had. We’d burn 30 minutes trying to figure out what to watch…, only to give up and go to bed. Worse, we’d forget which shows we were watching, miss new seasons of stuff we loved, and lose track of which platform a new movie was streaming on.

So I built a watchlist and tracker that works across every streaming service, with notifications for new episodes/seasons. I used Claude, Codex, and Gemini to plan it out, and Claude Code and Codex to architect the data model, debug Firebase issues, write Cloud Functions, and work through hundreds of decisions I’d otherwise have spent days researching. We loved using it so much that we made it public.”

How do you use AI? Tell us here.

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

See you soon,

Rowan, Joey, Zach, Shubham, and Jennifer — the humans behind The Rundown

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