OpenAI publishes a six-level Model Spec

OpenAI’s updated Model Spec sets out six instruction states — root, system, developer, user, guideline, and no authority — to make conflicts in model behavior legible. The company says the public document describes intended behavior, while production models do not yet fully reflect it; for builders, that is a reminder to encode application policy in explicit developer instructions and tests rather than assume a model’s defaults are a contract, much as the archive’s coding-agent control-plane analysis argues for hard boundaries.