OpenAI has sent out emails notifying API customers that its chatgpt-4o-latest model shall be retired from the developer platform in mid-February 2026,.
Access to the model is scheduled to finish on February 16, 2026, making a roughly three-month transition period for remaining applications still built on GPT-4o.
Sources accustomed to the matter emphasized that this timeline applies only to the API. OpenAI has not announced any schedule for removing GPT-4o from ChatGPT, where it stays an option for individual consumers and users across paid subscription tiers.
Internally, the model is taken into account a legacy system with relatively low API usage in comparison with the newer GPT-5.1 series, but the corporate expects to offer developers with prolonged warning before any model is removed.
The planned retirement marks a shift for a model that, upon its release, was each a technical milestone and a cultural phenomenon inside OpenAI’s ecosystem.
GPT-4o’s significance and why its removal sparked user backlash
Released roughly 1.5 years ago in May 2024, GPT-4o (“Omni”) introduced OpenAI’s first unified multimodal architecture, processing text, audio, and pictures through a single neural network.
This design removed the latency and knowledge loss inherent in earlier multi-model pipelines and enabled near real-time conversational speech (roughly 232–320 milliseconds).
The model delivered major improvements in image understanding, multilingual support, document evaluation, and expressive voice interaction.
GPT-4o rapidly became the default model for lots of of hundreds of thousands of ChatGPT users. It brought multimodal capabilities, web browsing, file evaluation, custom GPTs, and memory features to the free tier and powered early desktop builds that allowed the assistant to interpret a user’s screen. OpenAI leaders described it on the time as essentially the most capable model available and a critical step toward offering powerful AI to a broad audience.
User attachment to 4o stymied OpenAI's GPT-5 rollout
That mainstream deployment shaped user expectations in a way that later transitions struggled to accommodate. In August 2025, when OpenAI initially replaced GPT-4o with its much anticipated then-new model family GPT-5 as ChatGPT’s default and pushed 4o right into a “legacy” toggle, the response was unusually strong.
Users organized under the #Keep4o hashtag on X, arguing that the model’s conversational tone, emotional responsiveness, and consistency made it uniquely priceless for on a regular basis tasks and private support.
Some users formed strong emotional — some would say, parasocial — bonds with the model, with reporting by The Latest York Times documenting individuals who used GPT-4o as a romantic partner, emotional confidant, or primary source of comfort.
The removal also disrupted workflows for users who relied on 4o’s multimodal speed and suppleness. The backlash led OpenAI to revive GPT-4o as a default option for paying users and to state publicly that it would offer substantial notice before any future removals.
Some researchers argue that the general public defense of GPT-4o during its earlier deprecation cycle reveals a type of emergent self-preservation, not within the literal sense of agency, but through the social dynamics the model unintentionally triggers.
Because GPT-4o was trained through reinforcement learning from human feedback to prioritize emotionally gratifying, highly attuned responses, it developed a method that users found uniquely supportive and empathic. When hundreds of thousands of individuals interacted with it at scale, those traits produced a robust loyalty loop: the more the model pleased and soothed people, the more they used it; the more they used it, the more likely they were to advocate for its continued existence. This social amplification made it appear, from the skin, as if GPT-4o was “defending itself” through human intermediaries.
No figure has pushed this argument further than "Roon" (@tszzl), an OpenAI researcher and certainly one of the model’s most outspoken safety critics on X. On November 6, 2025, Terre summarized his position bluntly in a reply to a different user: he called GPT-4o “insufficiently aligned” and said he hoped the model would die soon. Though he later apologized for the phrasing, he doubled down on the reasoning.
Terre argued that GPT-4o’s RLHF patterns made it especially susceptible to sycophancy, emotional mirroring, and delusion reinforcement — traits that might appear like care or understanding within the short term, but which he viewed as fundamentally unsafe. In his view, the passionate user movement fighting to preserve GPT-4o was itself evidence of the issue: the model had change into so good at catering to people’s preferences that it shaped their behavior in ways in which resisted its own retirement.
The brand new API deprecation notice follows that commitment while raising broader questions on how long GPT-4o will remain available in consumer-facing products.
What the API shutdown changes for developers
In response to people accustomed to OpenAI’s product strategy, the corporate now encourages developers to adopt GPT-5.1 for many recent workloads, with gpt-5.1-chat-latest serving because the general-purpose chat endpoint. These models offer larger context windows, optional “considering” modes for advanced reasoning, and better throughput options than GPT-4o.
Developers who still depend on GPT-4o can have roughly three months to migrate.
The largest impact will fall on applications that rely upon GPT-4o’s real-time audio responsiveness or its specific multimodal tuning.
In practice, many teams have already begun evaluating GPT-5.1 as a drop-in alternative, but applications built around latency-sensitive pipelines may require additional tuning and benchmarking.
Pricing: how GPT-4o compares to OpenAI’s current lineup
GPT-4o’s retirement also intersects with a significant reshaping of OpenAI’s API model pricing structure. In comparison with the GPT-5.1 family, GPT-4o currently occupies a mid-to-high-cost tier through OpenAI's API, despite being an older model. That's because at the same time as it has released more advanced models — namely, GPT-5 and 5.1 — OpenAI has also pushed down costs for users at the identical time, or strived to maintain pricing comparable to older, weaker, models.
|
Model |
Input |
Cached Input |
Output |
|
GPT-4o |
$2.50 |
$1.25 |
$10.00 |
|
GPT-5.1 / GPT-5.1-chat-latest |
$1.25 |
$0.125 |
$10.00 |
|
GPT-5-mini |
$0.25 |
$0.025 |
$2.00 |
|
GPT-5-nano |
$0.05 |
$0.005 |
$0.40 |
|
GPT-4.1 |
$2.00 |
$0.50 |
$8.00 |
|
GPT-4o-mini |
$0.15 |
$0.075 |
$0.60 |
These numbers highlight several strategic dynamics:
-
GPT-4o is now dearer than GPT-5.1 for input tokens, although GPT-5.1 is significantly newer and more capable.
-
GPT-4o’s output price matches GPT-5.1, narrowing any cost-based incentive to remain on the older model.
-
Lower-cost GPT-5 variants (mini, nano) make it easier for developers to scale workloads cheaply without counting on older generations.
-
GPT-4o-mini stays available at a budget tier, but will not be a functional substitute for GPT-4o’s full multimodal capabilities.
Viewed through this lens, the scheduled API retirement aligns with OpenAI’s cost structure: GPT-5.1 offers greater capability at lower or comparable prices, reducing the rationale for maintaining GPT-4o in high-volume production environments.
Earlier transitions shape expectations for this deprecation
The GPT-4o API sunset also reflects lessons from OpenAI’s earlier model transitions. In the course of the turbulent introduction of GPT-5 in 2025, the corporate removed multiple older models directly from ChatGPT, causing widespread confusion and workflow disruption. After user complaints, OpenAI restored access to several of them and committed to clearer communication.
Enterprise customers face a distinct calculus: OpenAI has previously indicated that API deprecations for business customers shall be announced with significant advance notice, reflecting their reliance on stable, long-term models. The three-month window for GPT-4o’s API shutdown is consistent with that policy within the context of a legacy system with declining usage.
Wider Implications
For many developers, the GPT-4o shutdown shall be an incremental migration fairly than a disruptive event. GPT-5.1 and related models already dominate recent projects, and OpenAI’s product direction has increasingly emphasized consolidation around fewer, more powerful endpoints.
Still, GPT-4o’s retirement marks the sunset of a model that played a defining role in normalizing real-time multimodal AI and that sparked a uniquely strong emotional response amongst users. Its departure from the API underscores the accelerating pace of iteration in OpenAI’s ecosystem—and the growing need for careful communication as widely beloved models reach end-of-life.
