OpenAI's strongest model went public today after a 12-day government gate, and Grok matched its tier by afternoon at a quarter of Anthropic's price. Frontier capability is no longer the scarce thing; the clearance to ship it and the power to run it are

Two frontier models reached the public on the same Thursday, and how they got there matters more than what they can do. GPT-5.6 went generally available in three priced trims (Sol, Terra, Luna) after twelve days locked to government-approved partners under a "voluntary" White House review that functioned as preclearance; xAI's Grok 4.5 landed the same day claiming Opus-class work at $2/$6 against Anthropic's $5/$25. The model is now a cleared, tiered commodity, while TechCrunch's "Nvidia is a victim of the marketplace it created" shows compute deflating and the memory beside it climbing. Plus ChatGPT Work, Meta's Muse Spark, Meta's September chip production, and Ollama's $65M raise.