OpenAI upgrades ChatGPT for paying users, hands free accounts unlimited chats

Key points

• OpenAI is rolling out GPT-5.6 Sol to ChatGPT Plus and Pro subscribers, and GPT-5.6 Luna to Free and Go users this week.
• OpenAI's internal tests found GPT-5.6 Sol produced 68% fewer responses containing at least one factual error than the older GPT-5.5 Instant, with Luna cutting them by 62%.
• Free and Go users will get unlimited text chats starting next week, though file uploads and image generation remain capped.
• A new slider lets users dial reasoning effort from Instant to High, with High potentially taking minutes to answer.
• Stricter content rules will apply for users believed to be under 18, covering romantic roleplay, self-harm, and age-restricted goods.

OpenAI is pushing a new version of ChatGPT this week, and for once the interesting bit is not the marketing. Paid users on the Plus and Pro tiers get GPT-5.6 Sol. Free and Go users get GPT-5.6 Luna, and starting next week, unlimited text chats with it.

That second part matters more than the model name.

What actually changed?

The headline change is reliability, meaning fewer confidently wrong answers. OpenAI says GPT-5.6 Sol produces 68% fewer responses with at least one factual error compared to GPT-5.5 Instant, with Luna close behind at 62%, based on the company's own internal evaluations. Take that with the usual pinch of salt you apply to any vendor's self-reported benchmarks.

On top of that, there is a new intelligence slider, first reported by BleepingComputer, that lets users pick how hard the model thinks before answering. Slide it to Instant and you get a quick reply. Slide it to High and you might wait several minutes for something more considered. Free users do not get the slider but they do get a Think button that does roughly the same job for one question at a time.

The model is also supposed to stop padding answers. Ask who the US president is, you get a line. Ask how US elections work, you get a proper explanation. In practice, that is the sort of thing that sounds obvious in a blog post and then quietly regresses two updates later.

Why should security teams care about a chatbot update?

Because unlimited free chats change staff behaviour, and staff behaviour is where data leakage starts. When a tool is rate-limited, people ration what they paste into it. When it is unlimited, they stop rationing.

The failure mode here is familiar. An employee pastes a customer list, a snippet of source code, or an internal contract into ChatGPT to get a quick summary. That content leaves your environment. Depending on your OpenAI account type, it may or may not be used for training, but it is definitely no longer under your control. Samsung learned this the hard way in 2023 with source code, and the lesson has not stuck across the industry.

Fewer factual errors is a real safety improvement for end users. It is not a data-loss prevention control. A more confident-sounding wrong answer about a legal question or a dosage is arguably worse than an obviously bad one, because staff are more likely to act on it without checking.

What about younger users?

OpenAI is adding stricter boundaries for accounts it believes belong to under-18s. The new limits cover romantic roleplay, sexual content, self-harm topics like eating disorders and body image, age-restricted goods, and graphic violence. Age assurance on consumer chatbots is still a rough science, and the wording ("users believed to be under 18") tells you how confident OpenAI is in its own detection.

What should organisations actually do?

Treat ChatGPT as an outbound data channel and log it like one. If you have not already, put an AI usage policy in front of staff that names specific data types they must not paste in: customer records, credentials, source code, board material, anything under NDA. Then check whether your existing DLP, meaning data-loss-prevention tooling that spots sensitive information leaving the network, actually inspects traffic to chat.openai.com and the mobile apps. Most default deployments do not.

One thing the post-mortem will say, when the leak happens: we knew staff were using it, we just did not know what they were pasting.