OpenAI has sent out emails notifying API customers that its chatgpt-4o-latest model will be retired from the developer platform in mid-February 2026,. Access to the model is scheduled to end on February 16, 2026, creating a roughly three-month transition period for remaining applications still built on GPT-4o.Sources familiar with 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 remains an option for individual consumers and users across paid subscription tiers. Internally, the model is considered a legacy system with relatively low API usage compared to the newer GPT-5.1 series, but the company expects to provide developers with extended warning before any model is removed.The planned retirement marks a shift for a model that, upon its release, was both a technical milestone and a cultural phenomenon within OpenAI’s ecosystem.GPT-4o’s significance and why its removal sparked user backlashReleased roughly 1.5 years ago in May 2024, GPT-4o (“Omni”) introduced OpenAI’s first unified multimodal architecture, processing text, audio, and images through a single neural network. This design removed the latency and information 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 analysis, and expressive voice interaction.GPT-4o rapidly became the default model for hundreds of millions of ChatGPT users. It brought multimodal capabilities, web browsing, file analysis, 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 at the time as 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 rolloutThat mainstream deployment shaped user expectations in a wa …
