How to Install / Upgrade: OpenAI rolls out GPT-5.6 after government green light — and announces ‘ChatGPT Work’

GPT-5.6 is now available to everyone. About two weeks ago, OpenAI's newest model was caught up in regulatory drama and rolled out only to government-approved organizations during a limited preview period. The Trump administration has now given its green light for a public rollout, and CEO Sam Altman is calling GPT-5.6 the best model the company has ever produced. Alongside the wider release, OpenAI also announced a new offering called ChatGPT Work.

Because GPT-5.6 is a hosted model, there is nothing to download or compile; upgrading means switching your access over to it. In ChatGPT, update to the latest version of the app or refresh the web client, then open the model picker and select GPT-5.6 if it appears in your list. If you use the API, check OpenAI's model listing endpoint or the official documentation for the exact model identifier before changing any code, since guessing the string is a common source of errors. Teams interested in ChatGPT Work should watch OpenAI's official channels for availability details, as the product was only just announced.

The main gotcha is staged availability: public rollouts rarely reach every account at the same moment, so the model may not show up for you immediately even though the release is official. Access was previously restricted to government-approved organizations, so organizational accounts may see the transition at different times than individual ones. To verify you are actually on GPT-5.6, confirm the model name shown in the picker or in the API response metadata rather than trusting the model's own self-description. Before routing production traffic to it, re-run your existing prompts and evaluation suites, since a new model can behave differently from the one it replaces even when the upgrade itself takes one click.