GPT-5.6 — OpenAI's newest, sharpest model — went live to everyone Thursday. For two weeks before that, only a short list of "trusted partners" could touch it, while government reviewers poked around its cybersecurity teeth. * Fox's headline: "OpenAI limits GPT-5.6 Sol access to Trump administration partners." Picture a nightclub with a velvet rope, and Fox's version has the president standing at the door holding the guest list. * The White House looked at that mental image and said: there is no velvet rope, there is no bouncer, and there is definitely no guest list. A spokesperson put it bluntly: "No such permission is required or granted. The administration does not provide approvals for private companies to release AI models — decisions on timing and scope of releases rest entirely with the companies." * So OpenAI ran its safety homework past the government, flew engineers to Washington to compare notes with the Commerce Department, staggered the release for a couple weeks — and somehow that became "you needed Trump's OK" in one headline and "there was nothing to OK" straight from the White House's own mouth. * Both sides can't be right at once. Either the federal government quietly holds veto power over which companies get to play with frontier AI first, or it's just extremely good at looking like it does while insisting it doesn't. Fox picked the version with the bouncer. The bouncer says the door was never locked.