GPT-5.6 Sol Release Date: Announced June 26, Public July 9 — and What It Costs Now

GPT-5.6 Sol was released publicly on July 9, 2026 — a limited preview on June 26 for a small group of US government-approved partners, then the full launch across ChatGPT, Codex, and the GPT-5.6 Sol API once the federal review was lifted. If a search result told you it is "not yet released", that page is stale: Sol has been live for over a month, and it is available on OrcaRouter today at the exact list price — $5.00 per million input tokens and $30.00 per million output, with $0 per token added — and with bring-your-own-key your existing account is the only bill you see. This article is the Sol-specific release story: the three dates that matter, what changed since launch, and what it costs now.

GPT-5.6 is OpenAI's three-tier family — GPT-5.6 Sol as the flagship reasoning model, GPT-5.6 Terra as the balanced middle tier, and GPT-5.6 Luna as the fast, cost-efficient tier. Sol is the one people search for by name: OpenAI calls it its "workhorse" and best coding model, it is the tier the US government review treated most cautiously, and it is the only tier whose list price never moved in OpenAI's July 30 cut. The full family timeline is covered in our separate GPT-5.6 article; this page answers the Sol-specific question — when did it come out, and can I use it now.

The three dates that answer the question

• June 26, 2026 — limited preview. OpenAI announced GPT-5.6 and opened GPT-5.6 Sol to a small group of partners on the API and in Codex — roughly twenty companies, each individually approved by the US government under a June 2 executive order that set up benchmarking and assessment for new AI models. ChatGPT was not part of the preview.

• July 9, 2026 — public release. The review hold was lifted and GPT-5.6 Sol, GPT-5.6 Terra, and GPT-5.6 Luna launched publicly on ChatGPT, Codex, and the OpenAI API, with the global rollout spread across roughly 24 hours. This is the date current sources cite, and the one that belongs in your calendar.

• August 18, 2026 — today. Sol has been fully available for six weeks at an unchanged list price. OpenAI's July 30, 2026 repricing cut GPT-5.6 Terra to $2 / $12 and GPT-5.6 Luna to $0.20 / $1.20 per 1M while Sol held at $5 / $30 — and on August 6 the free ChatGPT tier's default switched to Luna, which is why the wave of "GPT-5.6 is free" headlines has nothing to do with Sol.

The reason the results for "gpt 5.6 sol release date" are so muddy is that the pages ranking there were written in two time windows. The news pieces from July 8–9 report the launch as imminent or just completed, and at least one high-ranking explainer was written during the preview — it still says "not yet released, no GA date" even though the public launch happened more than a month ago. If you read that page today, you would be told the answer is unknown. It isn't.

Why Sol's date is a different story from the family's

Terra and Luna went public the same day as Sol, but Sol carries the interesting release history. It was the flagship the review process treated most cautiously — the preview list of roughly twenty government-approved partners, the federal testing under the June 2 executive order, and the deferred public rollout all circled Sol specifically, because it is also the model OpenAI describes as its strongest cybersecurity model. That context matters when someone quotes you a single "release date": the announcement, the preview, and the public launch are three different days, and the gap between them was a government review, not a technical delay.

The timeline also explains why "release date" and "you can use it" are not the same question. The June 26 date is real but useless to almost everyone — the preview was API and Codex only, for a handful of named partners. The July 9 date is the one that matters, and even that rolled out globally over the course of a day. For practical purposes, "when did GPT-5.6 Sol come out" has one honest answer — July 9, 2026 — and "when can I use it" has been "now" ever since, subject to the surface-by-surface breakdown below.

What the release gives you, by surface

• ChatGPT — GPT-5.6 Sol is available in the ChatGPT apps on the Plus and Pro plans. Free and Go tiers do not include it: since August 6, 2026 their default model is GPT-5.6 Luna, with unlimited text chats.

• Codex — GPT-5.6 Sol is available for coding agents on OpenAI's Codex platform, the surface the flagship's coding strength was pointed at first.

• API — model id gpt-5.6-sol on the Chat Completions and Responses APIs, billed at $5 in / $30 out per 1M. This is the surface that matters for building, and the one this article is about.

• Regional availability — the July 9 rollout was gradual and global; most markets were served within the day, and OpenAI has not announced country-level gaps since. If you are building on the API, the gating factor is your OpenAI account and payment method, not a region lock.

That surface split is why the answer to "when is GPT-5.6 Sol available" is different for a consumer and a developer. For a ChatGPT user it is a subscription question — Plus or Pro, no free path. For a developer it is a pricing question — the model id, the $5 / $30 rate, and whether your router adds anything to it.

What it costs now, verified today

Verified on August 18, 2026 and cross-checked against the GPT-5.6 Sol model page on OrcaRouter and our own pricing articles. Sol's base rate is $5.00 per million input tokens and $30.00 per million output, unchanged by the July 30 repricing that cut the two cheaper tiers instead. Prompt cache reads bill $0.50 per million (a tenth of input), the batch API runs at $2.50 / $15.00, fast mode costs $10 / $60, and requests past roughly 32K input tokens step up to a long-context tier at $10 / $45. The context window is ~1.05M tokens with up to 128K output. Two caveats shape the real bill: internal reasoning tokens bill as output at $30 per million, and the full rate card with worked examples lives in our GPT-5.6 Sol pricing article.

How to call GPT-5.6 Sol today

If the release-date question was really an access question, the API answer is the same model id OpenAI publishes — gpt-5.6-sol — and OrcaRouter makes it a one-line change for anything that already speaks OpenAI's format: swap the base URL to api.orcarouter.ai/v1 and the model ID, and you are done. OrcaRouter passes OpenAI's list price through with $0 per-token markup, so the $5 / $30 on the model page is exactly what OpenAI charges, and a vendor price change is live on our side the same day it is announced. The same key and endpoint carry 200+ models, so Sol sits next to GPT-5.6 Terra, GPT-5.6 Luna, Claude Opus 5, and the open-weight models you would route to when a task does not earn Sol's rate.

Two OrcaRouter specifics belong on a release-date page, because both are about "can I use it today" without adding a second vendor. BYOK — bring your own OpenAI key and OpenAI bills you directly at its own rates, keeping your rate limits and credits intact while requests route through OrcaRouter with $0 per token added. Guardrails — the PII Shield and content policy run before billing, so a blocked request returns a clean 400 and is never charged, and the agent firewall grades tool and MCP calls before they execute.

The honest boundary

The release date is the easy part; the useful part is knowing when the flagship is the wrong answer despite being available. Sol's $30 output rate is the highest of the closed flagships below Claude Fable 5, and because reasoning tokens bill as output, a hard prompt at high reasoning effort can spend a large share of its bill on thinking. For short, simple prompts, GPT-5.6 Terra at $2 / $12 or GPT-5.6 Luna at $0.20 / $1.20 is the cheaper call; for latency-critical real-time work, a smaller model beats fast mode at $10 / $60. There is no free tier for Sol anywhere — not in free ChatGPT, which is Luna, and not on the API — so any page promising "free Sol" is selling something. And the honest platform note: OrcaRouter routes and bills; OpenAI runs the weights. The endpoint, the zero markup, the failover, and the guardrails are ours; inference quality and safety behavior are OpenAI's, and with BYOK the money goes straight to them. The date is settled, the price is the provider's, and the only open question left is whether your workload earns the flagship rate.

Bottom line

GPT-5.6 Sol was announced June 26, 2026, previewed to a small government-approved group, and released publicly on July 9, 2026 across ChatGPT, Codex, and the API. It has been fully available since, at an unchanged $5 / $30 per 1M while the two cheaper tiers took the July 30 price cut. If you are building, the shortest path from this answer to a working call is one OpenAI-compatible endpoint, your own key, and $0 markup — GPT-5.6 Sol is live on OrcaRouter as openai/gpt-5.6-sol, next to 200+ other models, and you can be calling it before the calendar date finishes mattering.

GPT-5.6 Sol is live on OrcaRouter at the exact list price — $5.00 in / $30.00 out per 1M, $0 per token added — and with bring-your-own-key the credits on your existing OpenAI key are the only bill you'll see. See GPT-5.6 Sol on OrcaRouter — one OpenAI-compatible endpoint for 200+ models, live in 60 seconds.