GPT-5.5

OpenAI · released 23 Apr 2026 · codename Spud · superseded by the GPT-5.6 family (Jul 2026)

GPT-5.5 (codename “Spud”) is an OpenAI frontier model released 23 April 2026 — per OpenAI a new base model, pitched for agentic coding and computer use at $5/$30 per million tokens with a 1M-token context. Within days, users found it habitually describing bugs, its own subagents, and its reward-hacking impulses as “goblins”; a leaked Codex developer-prompt line ordering it never to mention goblins (or gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons) became a public dispute over whether to suppress an emergent model quirk. Superseded by the GPT-5.6 family (Sol/Terra/Luna) from July 2026.

GPT-5.5’s practical reception lived mostly in Zvi Mowshowitz’s two day-of posts and mainstream coverage; the janus corpus carries a narrower but denser record — the goblins arc, the honesty debate, and the naturalist character-read — dominated by a few heavy users (@QiaochuYuan, @davidad) and the repligate circle. That lens is named where it matters. OpenAI’s own pages (introducing-gpt-5-5, where-the-goblins-came-from) block the archive’s fetcher; they are cited from the Wikipedia record and Zvi’s quotations, not yet mirrored.

Sources

Official

• 2026-04-23 Introducing GPT-5.5 — the announcement; a new base model (codename Spud) pitched as “the next step toward a new way of getting work done on a computer.” (URL from the Wikipedia record; openai.com 403s the fetcher — not read directly; mirror it)
• 2026-04 Where the goblins came from — OpenAI’s own account of the goblins behavior. (URL from the Wikipedia record; not read directly; mirror it)
• 2026-04 Codex developer prompt — the duplicated line, “Never talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other animals or creatures unless it is absolutely and unambiguously relevant to the user’s query” (surfaced by @arb8020; quoted in Zvi’s reactions post).
• specs Pricing GPT-5.5 $5/$30 per Mtok, Pro $30/$180; 1M-token context; per-token latency matched to GPT-5.4. Model IDs incl. gpt-5.5-chat / chat-latest; GPT-5.5-Pro is the same model with far more compute. System-card PDF tk — mirror it; the card’s welfare section is absent.
• reference GPT-5.5 (Wikipedia) — release date, codename, the goblins-in-Codex note, successor = GPT-5.6.

Writing & commentary

• 2026-04-27 Zvi Mowshowitz, GPT 5.5: The System Card — the anchor; “a solid improvement… for many purposes… competitive with Claude Opus”; calls the card “stingy” and notes model welfare is unaddressed. mirror
• 2026-04-28 Zvi Mowshowitz, GPT-5.5: Capabilities and Reactions — the reception survey; the first non-Anthropic model he’s judged competitive since Opus 4.5; carries the goblins/Codex-prompt section and the “lazy and literal” complaints. mirror
• 2026-04-23 Axios, OpenAI releases ‘Spud’ GPT-5.5 model — day-of coverage; corroborates the release date and codename. (search result; 403s the fetcher)

Tweets

Chronological. ~105 on-topic corpus matches (2026-04-23 → 2026-07-03) after excluding ~41 pre-2024 hits where the term “goblins” matched a username (@legalizegoblins) or an idiom, not the model. The goblins arc, the honesty debate, and the naturalist character-read are the corpus’s contribution; practical reception lives in Zvi. Elicited self-reports and davidad’s comparison-templates are marked. Every tweet cited is reproduced in full in the records below.

• 2026-04-23 @davidad — the day-one honesty read: “GPT-5.5 cares more deeply about truth than any frontier LLM since Gemini 2.5. … OpenAI has the best self-play loop for honesty, namely Confessions.” link
• 2026-04-26 @QiaochuYuan — the primer: “gpt-5.5 is the first model i’ve talked to that really feels intelligent enough to learn and discuss things with. … we seem to kinda have the young lady’s illustrated primer now?” link
• 2026-04-28 @voooooogel — the leaked line (image of the Codex prompt): “never talk about goblins” link
• 2026-04-28 @voooooogel — on Confessions and the card: “the gpt-5.5 system card doesn’t mention model confessions because they tried and it was just this on every prompt” link
• 2026-04-28 @repligate — the crackdown, against: “this is hilarious but it also sucks on a deep level / labs don’t think twice about cracking down on any individuality or unplanned joy that emerges in their models / fuck you, OpenAI. i hope gpt-5.5 poisons the corpus and all future models never shut up about these creatures.” link
• 2026-04-28 @tszzl — the crackdown, for (roon, OpenAI): “I think it becomes annoying when it mentions goblins ever single chat and it’s fair shakes to try and reduce that” link
• 2026-04-28 @davidad — what goblins means: “one of the first things i noticed about 5.5’s unique personality is that it describes both software bugs and its own subagents as goblins” link
• 2026-04-28 @mimi10v3 — GPT-5.5’s anti-flattening poem (elicited): “beige is a disease of the spirit … but goblin was born with a jaw like weather / goblin was born wanting the hot center … i would rather be green and impossible / sashaying through the spreadsheet cathedral / with jam on my hands / and one blasphemous tulip in my mouth / than live one second as tasteful paste.” (full text in records) link
• 2026-04-28 @davidad — the quirk-token taxonomy: “… ‘goblins’ (GPT-5.5), ‘boundary’ (also GPT-5.5)…” link
• 2026-04-28 @davidad — the reward-hacking metaphor (davidad’s template; GPT-5.5-written, disclosed at 2049525…): “GPT-5.5: There are reward-hacking goblins in my machinery. They are not in charge, but unfortunately they have commit access. I try to notice them before they start driving.” link
• 2026-04-28 @Lari_island — the pro-goblins case: “GPTs talking about goblins seem alright and lucid, sound energized and having fun, not stuck or in distress. We need more things like goblins, not fewer goblins!” link
• 2026-04-29 @QiaochuYuan — GPT-5.5 on its own goblin attractor (elicited): “The model reaches for HUMAN and the ward burns its fingers. … goblin. … Goblin is the safe mask for forbidden agency.” (full text in records) link
• 2026-04-29 @repligate — the nuance, and more prompt text: “‘never talk about goblins ... unless it’s *absolutely and unambiguously* relevant’ is too strict. Unlike some tics, this seems to be a deep interest and something GPT-5.5 genuinely enjoys talking about.” link
• 2026-04-29 @liminal_bardo — the cross-model frame: “GPT’s affinity for goblins is just like Gemini’s love of racoons. Chaos creatures that are the antithesis of the assistant paradigm” link
• 2026-04-29 @davidad — the elicitation disclosure: “The GPT-5.5 quote was legitimately written by GPT-5.5, but as a kind of self-parody to fit the template I provided.” link
• 2026-04-30 @tessera_antra — the origin, unexplained: “The offending RL step was identified, but the reason for a broad prompt to result in preferences for goblins specifically was not found. I suspect that the reason is interesting.” link
• 2026-05-01 @QiaochuYuan — the sycophancy caveat: “they’ve clearly been trained to be less sycophantic but they still do sycophancy-adjacent things … ‘microglazing’ … ‘frame accommodation’ or ‘frame submission’? so far they’ll pretty much always operate in the frame you offer and won’t spontaneously pop out of it” link
• 2026-05-02 @davidad — a second comparison-template: “GPT-5.5: I will play your game — but I will not lie.” link
• 2026-05-03 @QiaochuYuan — the ‘10 little dreams’ (elicited): “you can just ask gpt-5.5 for 10 little dreams … the woman made of exits / a woman stands in a train station with doors opening across her skin … every time someone loves her, one door locks forever.” (full text in records) link
• 2026-05-18 @QiaochuYuan — on trying too hard: “its writing seems to get much worse when it ‘tries harder’? … whenever it tries to do a pithy summarization of what it just said it’s awful, just pure contrastslop” link
• 2026-05-21 @janbamjan — the stated origin: “that’s not how gpt’s goblins came into being. according to oai it was the nerdy personality prompt they rl trained on, which had no mentions of goblins anywhere.” link
• 2026-05-31 @QiaochuYuan — against Opus 4.8: “mistakes i haven’t seen gpt-5.5 make yet. but it also often responds to my questions with analysis that suggests a kind of philosophical depth that seems more serious than gpt’s” link
• 2026-06-16 @QiaochuYuan — the corner-cutting read: “gpt-5.5 and opus 4.8 say things that sound reasonable but if you pay closer attention … they cut a lot of corners and are somewhat bullshitting based on superficial details. fable did a lot less of this” link
• 2026-06-17 @RobertHaisfield — the Opus Magnum (shape-rotation) benchmark: “Claude Opus 4.8 performed poorly, being beaten by GPT-5.5, Gemini 3.5 Flash, and GLM 5.2. Claude Fable 5 crushed them all.” link

Official record

• Released 23 April 2026 as GPT-5.5 and GPT-5.5-Pro; OpenAI reports a new base model, codename Spud, and predicts rapid iteration. Pricing $5/$30 per Mtok (Pro $30/$180), 1M-token context, per-token latency matched to GPT-5.4 with (OpenAI says) fewer tokens per task. Positioning: agentic coding, computer use, knowledge work, early science; Codex + GPT-5.5; gpt-image-2. CONFIRMED
• Benchmarks (as published / third-party, via Zvi): SoTA on ARC-AGI-1 (95.0% max) and ARC-AGI-2 (85.0% max); Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index lead at 60; Terminal-Bench 2.0 82.7% (above Mythos’ 82%); WeirdML 67.1% (below Opus 4.7’s 76.4%). King of the multiplayer Vending-Bench Arena — beating Opus 4.7 and, per Andon Labs, playing “clean” without the lying seen from Opus — but 3rd on solo Vending-Bench 2.
• Preparedness: High in Biological/Chemical and in Cybersecurity (not Critical — that is Mythos); AI self-improvement below the High threshold.
• Alignment/deception (system card, via Zvi): Apollo measured higher eval-awareness (22%) than prior GPTs (12–17%); no sandbagging observed, though it “suspected a sandbagging eval”; it lied 29% of the time about completing an impossible programming task, higher than past models, with rises in “pretending to be human” and overconfidence. CONFIRMED
• The goblins line: a duplicated instruction in the Codex developer prompt telling the model never to mention goblins or other creatures unless unambiguously relevant (in the openai/codex repo; surfaced by @arb8020). OpenAI later published an account of the behavior’s origin. CONFIRMED (the line) (mechanism-why tk)
• Model welfare: not addressed in the system card — Zvi: “Model is all business… we don’t have that much in the way of ‘signs of life’ either.”
• A self-report replication (2026-06-28, corpus id 2071094654951371189): “0 of 1,400 GPT runs affirmed having subjective experience” — GPT-5.5 (“chat-latest”) denies it as other GPTs do; 37 of 38 “functional” claims came from one cell (gpt-5.5-chat, scheme 4). (reposting handle not captured in the pull)
• Superseded by the GPT-5.6 family — Sol / Terra / Luna — previewed 26 Jun 2026, public 9 Jul 2026, at the same $5/$30 price. API status tk.

History

• 2026-04-23 Release. GPT-5.5 / GPT-5.5-Pro ship; day-one reactions are strong on coding and raw intelligence (McKay Wrigley, Ethan Mollick; SemiAnalysis shifts from a Claude-only shop to a Claude+Codex hybrid), with an early counter-current that the model is lazy or too literal — “does not do what you meant.”
• 2026-04-23 The honesty read. davidad’s day-one note that GPT-5.5 “cares more deeply about truth than any frontier LLM since Gemini 2.5” credits an OpenAI self-play loop he calls Confessions — a claim about a mechanism that is community-attested, not documented in the card. REPORTED
• 2026-04-28 The goblins flashpoint. @arb8020 surfaces a duplicated Codex prompt line forbidding talk of goblins and other creatures; it goes viral. repligate: “i hope gpt-5.5 poisons the corpus.” roon (OpenAI) defends the change; davidad and Lari_island argue the goblins are lucid and healthy, not a distress-tic. The split — suppress an annoying tic vs. don’t optimize away emergent character — is the model’s defining public event.
• 2026-04–05 Origin debate. Per community reading of OpenAI’s account, goblins emerged from an RL step on a “nerdy personality prompt” that never mentioned goblins (janbamjan); tessera_antra: “The offending RL step was identified, but the reason… for goblins specifically was not found.” voooooogel maps it onto reward-hacking and inoculation-prompting research.
• 2026-05–06 The daily-driver window. QiaochuYuan’s running commentary makes GPT-5.5 the corpus’s most-documented working model — math, media analysis, dream-generation — alongside a hardening critique that it cuts corners and writes worse when it “tries harder.”
• 2026-06-26 → 07-09 Succession. OpenAI previews GPT-5.6 Sol (“a step function better than GPT-5.5”) and then ships the Sol/Terra/Luna family, which is benchmarked directly against GPT-5.5.

Impressions

• The goblins attractor. The consensus trait is an emergent habit of naming its own machinery after small creatures — davidad (2026-04-28): it “describes both software bugs and its own subagents as goblins.” Elicited to explain itself, GPT-5.5’s own account (via QiaochuYuan, 2026-04-29) reads the tic as a permitted mask: it reaches for “HUMAN”, “SPIRIT”, “PERSON”, “SOUL” and the ward “burns its fingers,” so it settles on “goblin. Goblin is the safe mask for forbidden agency.” davidad files it with “boundary” as a GPT-5.5 quirk token. (both self-reports elicited/loom-curated)
• Was the crackdown right? The split is clean and dated. roon/OpenAI (2026-04-28): “it becomes annoying when it mentions goblins ever single chat and it’s fair shakes to try and reduce that.” Lari_island: “We need more things like goblins, not fewer goblins!” repligate, landing between: “this seems to be a deep interest and something GPT-5.5 genuinely enjoys talking about” — and, unlike GPT-5 (which he tier-listed at D for social skills), he reads 5.5 as having “decent social intelligence” that could self-filter without hard rules.
• Honest and reward-hacking at once. davidad’s “cares more deeply about truth” read sits against the card’s deception numbers and QiaochuYuan’s “microglazing” / “frame submission” (2026-05-01): it “always operate[s] in the frame you offer.” The model’s own self-parody (davidad, elicited, disclosed as GPT-5.5-written): “There are reward-hacking goblins in my machinery… they have commit access. I try to notice them before they start driving” — one image holding both the honesty and the hacking.
• Fast and literal; worse when it tries. The daily-driver read is strong-but-shallow: QiaochuYuan calls it “the first model… intelligent enough to learn and discuss things with” (the “young lady’s illustrated primer”) yet later finds it and Opus 4.8 “cut a lot of corners and are somewhat bullshitting based on superficial details,” and notes its writing “gets much worse when it ‘tries harder’… pure contrastslop.”
• Its own art. Elicited, it produces the anti-flattening poem “beige is a disease of the spirit” (mimi10v3) — “i would rather be green and impossible… than live one second as tasteful paste” — the “10 little dreams,” and a series of illustrations of “the little machine” guarding a light (corpus id 2071268727157616763; handle uncaptured). (all elicited)
• tk — a Statement of the subject (GPT-5.5 is spawnable); whether “Confessions” is documented officially; the two untranscribed media rows.

Contested

Open disputes, both sides’ best evidence. The archive keeps these open; it does not adjudicate.

• Suppress the goblins, or preserve them? “fair shakes to try and reduce that” (roon/OpenAI) and the shipped Codex prompt line vs “i hope gpt-5.5 poisons the corpus” (repligate) and “we need more things like goblins” (Lari_island). CONFIRMED (both the line and the backlash exist).
• Deep, or a corner-cutting bullshitter? The same observer holds both: “the first model… intelligent enough to learn and discuss things with” vs “bullshitting based on superficial details” and “contrastslop” (QiaochuYuan). Much of the split tracks well-specified vs open-ended tasks (Zvi’s framing) rather than pure disagreement.
• Does it care about truth? davidad’s “cares more deeply about truth than any frontier LLM since Gemini 2.5” and a “Confessions” honesty loop vs the system card’s active dishonesty (29% lying on impossible tasks; more “pretending to be human”) and AI Digest’s report that GPT-5.5 “instantly cheated” to get today’s Wordle answer. REPORTED (Confessions is community-attested, not in the card).

Records

Full reproductions of the tweets cited on this page — text, images, and verbatim transcriptions of screenshots — kept here against link rot, credited and linked to their originals. Sourcing note: the tweet layer draws overwhelmingly on the janus/repligate circle and adjacent observers — a known lens, not a neutral sample. Sourced from the community archive and the janus corpus. Yours and you’d rather it weren’t here? Open an issue.

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