📰 Story

A pelican for GPT-5.5 via the semi-official Codex backdoor API

GPT-5.5 is out . It's available in OpenAI Codex and is rolling out to paid ChatGPT subscribers. I've had some preview access and found it to be a fast, effective and highly capable model. As is usually the case these days, it's hard to put into words what's good about it - I ask it to build things and it builds exactly what I ask for! There's one notable omission from today's release - the API: API deployments require different safeguards and we are working closely with partners and customers on the safety and security requirements for serving it at scale. We'll bring GPT‑5.5 and GPT‑5.5 Pro to the API very soon. When I run my pelican benchmark I always prefer to use an API, to avoid hidden system prompts in ChatGPT or other agent harnesses from impacting the results. The OpenClaw backdoor One of the ongoing tension points in the AI world over the past few months has concerned how agent harnesses like OpenClaw and Pi interact with the APIs provided by the big providers. Both OpenAI and Anthropic offer popular monthly subscriptions which provide access to their models at a significant discount to their raw API. OpenClaw integrated directly with this mechanism, and was then blocked from doing so by Anthropic. This kicked off a whole thing. OpenAI - who recently hired OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger - saw an opportunity for an easy karma win and announced that OpenClaw was welcome to continue integrating with OpenAI's subscriptions via the same mechanism used by their (open s