AI Models Discontinued in 2026: The Running List

The list of AI models discontinued in 2026 is longer than most people realise, and it includes models you probably used this year. OpenAI removed GPT-4o from ChatGPT on February 13, 2026, saying only 0.1% of users chose it daily. Anthropic retired Claude Opus 4.1 on August 5, 2026. Google shut down the entire Gemini 2.0 Flash family on June 1, 2026. None of these were announced with much noise, and most people found out when something stopped working.

This page tracks all of it in one place: what has already been switched off, what disappears in the next few weeks, and what each provider says you should use instead. Every date here comes from the provider’s own deprecation documentation rather than second-hand reporting, and where the two disagree, that is called out explicitly. Last verified on August 6, 2026.

The Key Takeaways

• Four shutdowns land within three weeks. ChatGPT Atlas on August 9, Imagen 4 on August 17, o3 and the Assistants API on August 26, and the DALL·E GPT on August 30, 2026.
• The biggest sweep is October 23, 2026, when OpenAI removes GPT-3.5 Turbo, GPT-4, GPT-4 Turbo, o1, o1-pro, o3-mini and o4-mini from the API in one go.
• Sora 2 is not dead yet. Widely reported as shut down in March, it was only announced then. Removal from the API is September 24, 2026.
• Gemini 2.5 has no announced shutdown date. Google’s own docs say so, despite trackers listing October 16, 2026 as fact.
• Anthropic gives the most warning: at least 60 days, plus a public commitment to preserve retired model weights.

AI Models Discontinued From the Apps You Actually Use

Almost every deprecation tracker covers APIs only. That is useful if you write code, and useless if you are the person who opened ChatGPT one morning and found your favourite model missing from the picker. This section covers the consumer side.

GPT-4o

The one that caused real anger was GPT-4o. OpenAI retired it from ChatGPT on February 13, 2026, in an announcement titled “Retiring GPT-4o, GPT-4.1, GPT-4.1 mini, and OpenAI o4-mini in ChatGPT.” GPT-5 Instant and GPT-5 Thinking went the same day under a separate, earlier notice. The company’s stated justification was that only 0.1% of users chose GPT-4o on a daily basis, with most usage having moved to GPT-5.2.

Users disagreed loudly. A #Keep4o campaign spread across Reddit and X within days, and a Change.org petition gathered more than 20,000 signatures, echoing the backlash when OpenAI first pulled 4o at the GPT-5 launch in 2025 and then restored it. This time it stayed gone. Conversation history involving the retired models remained viewable, but no new responses could be generated from them. Crucially, the API was unaffected at the time, which is a pattern worth internalising: the same model can vanish from ChatGPT months before it leaves the API. If you kept a workflow tied to that model, our guide on how people kept using GPT-4o after GPT-5 shipped explains why those workarounds no longer apply.

GPT-4.5, o3, DALL·E GPT

Three more removals follow this month. GPT-4.5 left ChatGPT in late June 2026. o3 leaves on August 26, 2026 after a 90 day sunset, and that change applies to ChatGPT only, not the API, where o3 survives until December. The official DALL·E GPT retires on August 30, 2026, announced on July 31. Image generation itself is not going away: it moves to ChatGPT Images, which is available on every tier including free accounts, and custom GPTs with image generation switched on are unaffected. You are advised to download anything you want to keep first. If you are picking a replacement, our breakdown of the current ChatGPT image generator covers what changed.

ChatGPT Atlas

ChatGPT Atlas is the odd one out because it is not a model at all. OpenAI announced on July 9 that the browser stops working on August 9, 2026, roughly eight months after launch. Bookmarks have to be exported manually as an HTML file. Open tabs, browsing history and login sessions do not transfer at all, though your ChatGPT conversations are stored separately and survive. We covered the migration options in detail in our roundup of what to use instead of ChatGPT Atlas.

Discontinued AI Models At Glance

What Shuts Down in the Next 90 Days

This is the section worth bookmarking. Nine separate shutdowns land between now and early October 2026, across all three major providers.

The Sora 2 entry deserves attention because OpenAI lists no replacement at all for it or the Videos API. That is unusual. Every other deprecation on OpenAI’s list points at a substitute model. If you built anything on Sora 2, there is no official migration path, and our comparison of Sora 2 against Veo 3 is a reasonable starting point for finding an alternative elsewhere.

AI Models Discontinued From the APIs Later in 2026

Past October, the pace does not slow down. Here is the rest of the year by provider, taken from each company’s deprecation documentation.

OpenAI

October 23, 2026 is the single largest cull of the year. It removes gpt-3.5-turbo, gpt-4, gpt-4-turbo, gpt-4-1106-preview, gpt-4.1-nano, the gpt-4o-2024-05-13 snapshot, gpt-image-1, o1, o1-pro, o3-mini and o4-mini, along with fine-tuned versions built on several of those bases. A great deal of production code written between 2023 and 2025 stops working that day.

After that the pace holds. Evals become read-only on October 31, then reusable prompts, the Evals dashboard and Agent Builder all shut down on November 30. On December 1, gpt-image-1-mini, gpt-image-1.5 and chatgpt-image-latest give way to gpt-image-2. The older GPT-5 snapshots plus o3 and o3-pro go on December 11, and the legacy audio, realtime and transcription families follow on January 20, 2027. Full details are in OpenAI’s deprecations documentation.

Anthropic

Anthropic’s 2026 retirements are already behind us. Claude Opus 3 went in January, Claude Sonnet 3.7 and Claude 3.5 Haiku in February, and Claude 3 Haiku in April. Claude Sonnet 4 and Claude Opus 4 followed in June, and Claude Opus 4.1 on August 5. No Claude model currently carries a firm assigned retirement date, though Claude Mythos Preview is marked deprecated with no date published yet.

What Anthropic publishes instead are floors, and it publishes one for every active model. The nearest are Claude Sonnet 4.5 at September 29, 2026, Claude Haiku 4.5 at October 15, 2026 and Claude Opus 4.5 at November 24, 2026. The rest run into 2027, with Claude Opus 5 not retiring sooner than July 24, 2027. These are guarantees of minimum life rather than scheduled deaths, which is a meaningfully friendlier way to run a lifecycle. The current lineup and its dates are listed in Anthropic’s model deprecations page, and if you are weighing up a move, our writeup of Claude Opus 5 covers where the line stands today.

Google

Google frames all of this differently from its rivals, and the difference matters before you read a single date. Its documentation states plainly that published shutdown dates “indicate the earliest possible dates on which a model might be retired,” with exact dates communicated later. Every Google date below is a floor rather than a deadline.

With that caveat: the Gemini 2.0 Flash family carried June 1, 2026, and Veo 2.0 and Veo 3.0 carried June 30, 2026, both now passed. Imagen 4 is listed for August 17 and gemini-2.5-flash-image for October 2. Beyond that, gemini-3.1-flash-lite carries a May 7, 2027 date. The full table lives in Google’s Gemini deprecations documentation.

Three Dates Most Trackers Get Wrong

This topic is unusually prone to bad information, because one aggregator’s error gets copied everywhere within days. Three claims are circulating widely that the primary sources do not support.

Sora 2 was not shut down in March 2026. OpenAI announced the deprecation on March 24. Removal from the API is September 24, 2026. Somewhere along the line the announcement date got reported as the shutdown date, and Sora 2 has been described as dead for months while still running.

The whole o-series does not die on October 23. That date covers o1, o1-pro, o3-mini and o4-mini. Full o3 and o3-pro shut down on December 11, 2026, under a separate announcement. The two are frequently merged into one sentence.

Gemini 2.5 has no announced shutdown date. Several trackers list October 16, 2026 as a firm retirement date for Gemini 2.5 Pro and Flash. Google’s Gemini API deprecations page lists all three 2.5 models as “No shutdown date announced.” The October date appears to come from notices sent to Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform customers, a different product surface from the Gemini API. Even in those notices Google framed it as “no earlier than,” saying a confirmed date would be set once Gemini 3 reached general availability, with at least six months of warning after that. If you are planning a migration, plan it against Google’s published documentation, not the trackers.

How Much Warning Each Company Gives You

The retirement policies differ more than the dates do, and the differences tell you something about how safe it is to build on each platform.

Anthropic is the only one of the three that has publicly committed to preserving retired model weights. Its documentation goes further still, acknowledging the downsides of retirement, including the loss of access for researchers running comparative studies. OpenAI’s split between ChatGPT and API schedules is the detail that catches most people out. Take o3: gone from ChatGPT on August 26, still available through the API until December 11. One model, two clocks.

What To Do When Your AI Model Is Discontinued

There is a practical checklist here, and it is short.

Export anything stored inside the product before the date, because chat history, generated images and bookmarks are frequently not migrated. Check whether the replacement costs more, because it often does. Google now points Gemini 2.5 Flash users at Gemini 3.6 Flash, which lists at $1.50 input and $7.50 output per million tokens. Gemini 2.5 Flash cost $0.30 and $2.50. That is five times the input price and three times the output, for the same job. Test the replacement on your actual work rather than trusting the substitution table, because a recommended replacement is a routing decision, not a promise of identical behaviour. And if a specific model’s tone or output style is the thing you care about, accept that you will have to re-tune your prompts.

The broader lesson is harder to act on but more valuable. Every model you rely on has a retirement date, whether or not it has been published yet. The people least disrupted by all of this are the ones who never depended on a single provider. Having ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and several open alternatives in one place turns a shutdown into an inconvenience rather than a migration project. That is the entire premise behind running every major AI model from one Mac app. Our guide on picking the right AI model for each task is a good place to work out your fallbacks. And open-weight models deserve a look precisely because nobody can switch them off remotely.

The Bottom Line

Well over a hundred models, snapshots and products were retired or scheduled for retirement across OpenAI, Anthropic and Google during 2026, and the pace is increasing rather than levelling off. The useful response is not to track every date, but to stop building anything important on a single model. Check this page before you plan a migration, verify against the provider’s own documentation rather than a tracker, and keep a working alternative for every model you depend on. We update this list as new shutdown dates are announced.

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