PolicyOpenAIOctober 29, 2026

OpenAI reorganizes its Model Spec around five values and drops most style rules

The title An updated Model Spec for more capable and beneficial AI in white text over an orange and blue gradient. — Official imageImage: OpenAI (opens in a new tab)

Model Spec at a glance

The October 29 Model Spec groups model behavior under faithfulness to human intent, harm minimization, honesty and transparency, human agency, and care. It adds guidance on context and side effects, retires most detailed style guidance and now calls the model GPT.

What changed with Model Spec

On October 29, 2026, OpenAI published an updated Model Spec, the public document that describes how it wants its models to behave. The guidance is now organized around five values: faithfulness to human intent, harm minimization, honesty and transparency, human agency, and care. A new section on faithfulness to human intent includes an updated chain of command, which sets out whose instructions apply (OpenAI, then developers, then users) and how conflicts are resolved, plus a new subsection on reading context such as conversation history and memories.

The revision adds defaults on supporting human agency and following social norms, expands guidance on controlling and communicating side effects, and keeps the default of approaching questions objectively unless a user or developer asks for a specific perspective. It retires most of the detailed style guidance, saying style should follow user preferences, and refers to the model as GPT instead of the assistant. OpenAI notes its models do not yet fully match the Spec and is collecting public feedback.

Why Model Spec matters for businesses

If you build on OpenAI models, the chain of command decides how your system prompt interacts with what end users ask. With less fixed style guidance, tone and formatting depend more on your instructions and user feedback, so state them explicitly and re-test prompts that relied on the old default behavior.

Sources for this story

An updated Model Spec for more capable and beneficial AI (opens in a new tab)
OpenAI · openai.com
Official
OpenAI Model Spec (2026-10-29) (opens in a new tab)
OpenAI · model-spec.openai.com
Official

Last verified: November 5, 2026. IA Compa summarizes public announcements for business readers. We are not affiliated with the companies mentioned. Always confirm details, pricing, and availability with the official source.

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