GPT-5.6 Sol vs GPT-6.1 Sol

GPT-5.6 Sol is the flagship model in OpenAI's GPT-5.6 family, which also includes Terra (a balanced everyday-work tier) and Luna (a fast, cost-efficient tier). Sol is designed for demanding reasoning, long-horizon agentic workflows, software engineering, computer use, scientific research, and cybersecurity tasks. It introduces two new capability modes: a "max" reasoning effort setting that allocates additional compute time for difficult problems, and an "ultra" mode that coordinates multiple subagents in parallel to accelerate complex, multi-step work. The model supports native multimodal input, allowing it to process screenshots, diagrams, charts, documents, and photographs alongside text. A reported context window of approximately 1.5 million tokens enables processing of large codebases, lengthy research documents, and extended agentic sessions.

GPT-5.6 Sol was announced on June 26, 2026, initially in a limited preview for trusted partners, and reached general availability on July 9, 2026. On the Agents' Last Exam benchmark, which evaluates long-running professional workflows across 55 fields, Sol scores 53.6. On Terminal-Bench 2.1, which tests command-line agentic coding workflows, Sol Ultra achieves 91.9%. The model also demonstrates gains in life sciences evaluations, including long-horizon genomics and quantitative biology analyses. OpenAI paired the release with its most extensive safety evaluation to date, combining human red teaming with large-scale automated testing, and classified Sol as High capability in both cybersecurity and biological risk under its Preparedness Framework, though it does not cross the Critical threshold in either category.

GPT-6.1 Sol is a reasoning model in OpenAI's GPT-6 series that accepts text and image input and returns text. It is an upgrade to GPT-6 Sol positioned to approach the intelligence of the larger GPT-6 Astra model on agentic coding, computer use, and professional knowledge work. The model exposes an adjustable reasoning effort control, ranging from low settings for simple turns to maximum settings for harder tasks, and can be driven with tool use enabled or disabled. It operates over a context window of roughly one million tokens and emits up to 128,000 output tokens in a single response, which supports long-running agent loops over large codebases and multi-document collections. Audio and video inputs are not supported.

On the visual side, the model is evaluated on GDP.pdf, a benchmark that asks professional questions about complex PDF documents containing tables, charts, diagrams, and fine-print details, and on OSWorld 2.0, which measures agents operating graphical computer applications. OpenAI reports that GPT-6.1 Sol performs on par with or better than GPT-6 Sol across its image input safety evaluations, and that the share of responses containing a factual error at low reasoning effort falls from 11.4 percent to 7.7 percent.