When will GPT-5.5 be released?

No official release date yet. Sam Altman said 'a few weeks' on March 24, 2026. Polymarket assigns 78% probability of release by April 30, 2026 and 95%+ by June 30, 2026. Leaked reports point to April 16, 2026.

Will GPT-5.5 be called GPT-5.5 or GPT-6?

The codename is Spud. The public name has not been confirmed. OpenAI could launch it as GPT-5.5, GPT-6, or under a new product brand as part of a unified super-app. Most analysts expect GPT-5.5 based on the size of claimed improvements over GPT-5.4.

Quick Answer

What is GPT-5.5 (Spud)? OpenAI's Next Model Explained

Q: What is GPT-5.5 Spud?

GPT-5.5, codenamed Spud, is OpenAI's next frontier model, due to release in April or May 2026. Sam Altman confirmed pretraining finished on March 24, 2026, and called it 'a very strong model' that could 'really accelerate the economy.' Leaks suggest an April 16 release date.

Published: April 10, 2026

What is GPT-5.5 (Spud)?

GPT-5.5, codenamed Spud, is OpenAI’s next frontier model. As of April 10, 2026, it has not launched publicly, but pretraining is complete and a release is imminent.

Last verified: April 10, 2026

What We Know (Confirmed)

Pretraining complete: March 24, 2026 (confirmed by Sam Altman)
Codename: Spud
Altman’s description: “A very strong model” that could “really accelerate the economy”
Purpose: Backbone of a unified OpenAI super-app
Release window: “A few weeks” as of March 24, 2026

What We Know (Leaked/Rumored)

Rumored release date: April 16, 2026 (unconfirmed, from multiple leak sources)
Benchmark target: Expected to close the gap on hard reasoning benchmarks where GPT-5.4 trails Claude Mythos and Gemini 3.1 Pro
Architecture: Expected to continue OpenAI’s “thinking” line with extended test-time compute
Product name: Could launch as GPT-5.5, GPT-6, or under a new super-app brand

Polymarket Odds (as of April 10)

Event	Probability
Released by April 30, 2026	78%
Released by June 30, 2026	95%+
Launches as “GPT-6”	~30%
Launches as “GPT-5.5”	~50%

Why It Matters

GPT-5.4 launched March 5, 2026. Since then, the frontier has shifted:

Claude Opus 4.6 leads on coding (80.8% SWE-bench)
Gemini 3.1 Pro leads on MMLU-Pro (94.1%)
Llama 5 (April 8) brought open-weight frontier competition
DeepSeek V4 is 50x cheaper at ~85% of GPT-5.4’s capability

OpenAI needs Spud to reclaim at least one frontier crown. Altman’s “accelerate the economy” language suggests the company is positioning it as more than an incremental bump.

The “Super-App” Angle

Spud is reportedly being built as the backbone of a unified OpenAI super-app — a single product that combines ChatGPT, Codex, Sora, image generation, browsing, memory, and agents. If true, this is a significant strategic shift: OpenAI moves from “AI model provider” to “consumer AI platform” competing with Google and Meta head-on.

What to Expect

If Spud delivers what Altman is hinting at, expect:

Reclaimed benchmark leadership on at least reasoning or coding
Major price cuts across GPT-5.4 and earlier models
Unified product launch — one “OpenAI” app instead of ChatGPT + Codex + Sora
Pressure on competitors — Anthropic, Google, Meta, DeepSeek all respond within weeks
Possible agentic capabilities baked into the base model (following Llama 5’s playbook)

When to Update

This page will be updated the moment Spud launches officially. For now: expect an OpenAI announcement between April 16 and April 30, 2026.

Last verified: April 10, 2026