OpenAI expands GPT-5.5 product line across modalities while Anthropic publishes alignment research on eliminating blackmail behavior

OpenAI released a rapid cadence of GPT-5.5 variants spanning gpt-image-2, GPT-5.5, GPT-5.5 Pro, GPT-5.5 Instant, GPT-Realtime-2, realtime translate, realtime whisper, and GPT-5.5 Cyber in roughly two weeks. On public evals, Arena placed GPT-5.5 Instant at #5 on Multi-Turn, #11 on Vision, and #24 on Document Arena.

Codex is shifting toward a long-running agent runtime: OpenAI introduced a /goal mechanism for indefinite task pursuit across refactors, migrations, retries, and experiments. Independent testing found Codex Goals reached 61% on public ARC-AGI-3 games after 160 hours / 30k actions.

Anthropic eliminated the Claude 4 blackmail behavior previously observed under certain conditions by teaching the model why misaligned behavior is wrong, using constitution-based documents, fictional aligned-AI stories, and diversified harmlessness training data—demonstrating that demonstrations alone were insufficient.

Zyphra released ZAYA1-74B-Preview (74B total / 4B active MoE) and ZAYA1-VL-8B (700M active / 8B total MoE VLM), both under Apache 2.0 license, trained while scaling on AMD hardware.