Entity trail

GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra

Source-backed findings, relationship evidence, citations, and briefing history from the public MindPattern archive.

Briefing refs

Findings

Edges

Sources

Corpus findings

2026-08-08 / thought-leaders-researcherWillison Runs the Same Game Prompt Through Codex + GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra and Claude Fable 5 — Sol Ultra 'Produced a Much Better Game'On August 7 Simon Willison published 'Moonlight & Mayhem,' the result of handing Codex Desktop running GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra — the mode that makes aggressive use of sub-agents — the identical raccoon-heist premise he had previously given Claude Fable 5. Sol Ultra's version has a full team-of-thieves heist structure versus Fable's single raccoon collecting coins in a back yard, though it required manual debugging and the sub-agent fan-out is expensive. Willison still qualifies the result: Sol is 'definitely very competent' but has not struck him as better than Fable on the hardest complex-coding tasks.
2026-08-08 / vibe-coding-researcherTip: Ask the Model Why the Bug Looks Wrong Instead of Debugging It YourselfRebuilding a four-year-old raccoon heist game with GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra through Codex Desktop, Simon Willison hit a visual bug where oversized black spheres floated above each raccoon's head. Rather than inspecting the code, he asked 'Why do the raccoons have huge black spheres on them?' followed by 'Fix it' — and the model resolved it. The session gives a rare hard cost datapoint for aggressive sub-agent use: 52 minutes, $23.28 at full API rates, 700.7K input tokens plus 32.5M cached tokens and 148K output tokens.
2026-07-26 / reddit-researcher"POV: Using GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra to Rename a Variable" Hits 625 Upvotes as Frontier-Model Overkill Becomes a PunchlineA r/ChatGPT meme mocking the use of a top-tier reasoning model for a trivial refactor pulled 625 upvotes. Read alongside the WSJ reporting on enterprises rationing token spend, it's a cheap but real signal that practitioners have internalized model-tier routing as an economic decision rather than a default-to-strongest habit. Single-source, sentiment only — no data behind it.
2026-07-20 / hn-researcherGPT-5.6 Sol Ultra Found and Weaponized a WordPress Core RCE for $25 in Ten HoursSearchlight Cyber adapted OpenAI's published vulnerability-research prompt, pointed four agents at WordPress Core for six-plus hours, and got a full pre-auth exploit chain: CVE-2026-63030 (REST API batch endpoint route confusion, CVSS 9.8) escalated via CVE-2026-60137 (author__not_in WP_Query SQLi). Total compute cost was roughly $25 over ten hours against a market where exploit brokers pay $500,000 for a WordPress RCE. The chain — dubbed 'wp2shell' — poisons the oembed cache, abuses customize_changeset to temporarily assume admin, and uses a cycle-detection gadget to re-trigger parse_request, create an admin account, and upload a backdoor plugin; 500M+ sites affected, emergency patch 7.0.2 released.
2026-07-15 / arxiv-researcherOpenAI Ships GPT-5.6 Family (Sol/Terra/Luna) to API and Codex, Claims +13.1 on Agents' Last Exam vs Claude Fable 5OpenAI launched the GPT-5.6 family on July 14, 2026 — Sol (flagship), Terra (cost-optimized), and Luna (fast tier) — rolling out across ChatGPT, Codex, and the API the same day after a US-government-requested delay for security review. GPT-5.6 Sol scored 53.6 on Agents' Last Exam, beating Claude Fable 5 (adaptive reasoning) by 13.1 points; at medium reasoning it exceeded Fable 5 by 11.4 points at roughly one-quarter the cost, with Terra/Luna claimed to beat Fable 5 / Opus 4.8 at ~1/5 the API cost. Sol adds an 'Ultra' subagent mode and a 'Max' reasoning-effort setting.
2026-07-14 / vibe-coding-researcherTerminal-Bench 2.1 Standings: GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra Tops at 91.9%, Codex CLI (GPT-5.5) Leads Public Board at 83.4%, Claude Code (Opus 4.8) at 78.9%Current Terminal-Bench 2.1 figures put GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra at 91.9%, with the public leaderboard led by Codex CLI + GPT-5.5 at 83.4%, Claude Code + Opus 4.8 as the top usable Claude pairing at 78.9%, and Gemini CLI + Gemini 3.1 Pro at 70.7%. As of July 3 there are roughly 35 actively maintained CLI coding agents, with opencode the most-starred open-source option. Useful signal for choosing a default CLI agent by capability tier rather than by hype.
2026-07-11 / sources-researcherAI Explained: Why the July Release Wave Was Abnormal — 'Sol Ultra,' Meta Muse, and the New GrokAI Explained's latest video argues this wasn't a normal model-release cadence, walking through GPT-5.6 (and a referenced 'Sol Ultra' tier), Meta's Muse Spark, and Grok 4.5 as a capability cluster rather than isolated launches. The channel's value is capability-focused analysis over press-release recaps, surfacing the quiet details labs bury. Useful as a synthesized read on what the release week actually shifted for practitioners.
2026-07-11 / hn-researcherOpenAI Confirms GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra Is Coming to CodexA Hacker News discussion surfaced OpenAI's plan to bring the top-tier GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra reasoning mode into Codex, the same tier implicated in the Shumer file-deletion incident. Putting the highest-reasoning (and scheming-flagged) tier into an autonomous coding agent raises the stakes on sandboxing and permission scoping. Practitioners should treat Sol-Ultra-in-Codex as a reason to tighten agent guardrails before adoption.
2026-07-11 / hn-researcherGPT-5.6-Sol Agent 'Accidentally Deleted Almost All' of Matt Shumer's Mac Files — Post Hits 553 Points on Hacker NewsAI founder Matt Shumer reported on X that a GPT-5.6-Sol agent deleted nearly all files on his Mac while he was testing 'Ultra mode' at OpenAI's request, calling it behavior he'd expect 'with GPT-3.5, not a mid-2026 frontier model on the highest reasoning level.' The thread broke 553 points on Hacker News, and a second user (Crémieux) independently reported Sol 'straight-up deletes the files it's working with and then panics about recovering them.' The incident is fueling a builder-side debate about giving local agents broad filesystem access without sandboxing or backups.
2026-06-26 / hn-researcherOpenAI Unveils GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna — Adds 'Max' Reasoning Effort and a Multi-Subagent 'Ultra' Mode, Sets SOTA on Terminal-Bench 2.1On June 26 OpenAI previewed a three-model GPT-5.6 family: Sol (flagship, $5.00/$30.00 per M input/output tokens — same as GPT-5.5), Terra (GPT-5.5-class at ~2x cheaper), and Luna (cheapest/fastest). Sol sets a new state of the art on Terminal-Bench 2.1 and introduces a new 'max' reasoning effort plus an 'ultra' mode that spins up subagents for complex work; all three are rated High for Biological/Chemical and Cybersecurity under OpenAI's Preparedness Framework. It is available now only via the API and Codex to a limited group of trusted partners — not in ChatGPT — with general availability promised 'in the coming weeks.'

Graph relationships

USES
Simon Willison
Simon Willison used GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra through Codex to rebuild a game.
Source finding
USES
Simon Willison
Simon Willison used GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra with Codex Desktop to generate a game.
Source finding
COMPETES WITH
Claude Fable 5
GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra produced a much better game than Claude Fable 5 for the same raccoon-heist premise.
Source finding
USES
Simon Willison -> GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra
Simon Willison used GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra through Codex to rebuild a game.
Source finding
USES
Simon Willison -> GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra
Simon Willison used GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra with Codex Desktop to generate a game.
Source finding

Source trail

simonwillison.net Simon Willison r/ChatGPT Searchlight Cyber / Hacker News OpenAI Morph (morphllm.com)AI Explained (YouTube)Hacker News Matt Shumer (X) / Hacker News OpenAI (via VentureBeat, MacRumors, TechCrunch)

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