OpenAI deprecates GPT-4o, GPT-4o mini, GPT-4.1 and GPT-4.1 mini in the API
Shutdown January 14, 2027, replacement gpt-6-luna
Confirmed
Status
- Claim
Confirmed
- Our reporting
- High confidence
- Importance
- 3 of 5
- Last verified
- 15 October 2026
Your AI and this story
- GPT-6 Astra167 days after its cutoff
- Claude Opus 5.5106 days after its cutoff
- Gemini 4 Argon197 days after its cutoff
- Grok 4.7136 days after its cutoff
None of these four assistants can know about it. The closest, Claude Opus 5.5, stops 106 days before it.
Key facts
- Notice date: 2026-10-14; shutdown date: 2027-01-14 (three months’ notice)
- Models: gpt-4o-2024-08-06, gpt-4o-2024-11-20, gpt-4o-mini-2024-07-18, gpt-4.1-2025-04-14, gpt-4.1-mini-2025-04-14
- Recommended replacement for all five: gpt-6-luna
- Fine-tuned versions of these models follow the same shutdown schedule as their base models
- Earlier: gpt-4o-2024-05-13 and gpt-4.1-nano were already scheduled for shutdown on 2026-10-23
- Oct 1, 2026 notice: gpt-5.3-codex and gpt-5.1 removed 2027-04-01 (replacement gpt-6-sol), gpt-5.4-nano removed 2027-04-01 (replacement gpt-6-luna)
- Oct 1, 2026 notice: tts-1, tts-1-hd, gpt-4o-mini-tts-2025-03-20 and gpt-4o-mini-tts-2025-12-15 removed 2027-01-06 (replacement gpt-realtime-2.1-mini)
What happened
OpenAI’s API deprecations page carries a section dated 2026-10-14 (“GPT-4 series model deprecations”): developers using
the listed GPT-4o and GPT-4.1 snapshots were notified that the models will be removed from the API on January 14, 2027.
For every model the page names gpt-6-luna, OpenAI’s small, cheap GPT-6 tier, as the replacement. Fine-tuned models
built on these bases are shut down on the same date, which matters because GPT-4o and GPT-4.1 were among the last
fine-tunable OpenAI chat models.
Two weeks earlier, a 2026-10-01 section had scheduled gpt-5.3-codex, gpt-5.1 and gpt-5.4-nano for removal on
April 1, 2027 (six months’ notice) and the older text-to-speech models (tts-1, tts-1-hd and both gpt-4o-mini-tts
snapshots) for January 6, 2027, pointing voice users to gpt-realtime-2.1-mini.
The notice was found on the deprecations page itself (and through the aiweekly.co news list of Oct 15); no OpenAI blog post or press coverage of it had been found as of 2026-10-15. Whether ChatGPT or Azure OpenAI are affected is not stated on the page.
Why it matters
GPT-4o (May 2024) was OpenAI’s first natively multimodal “omni” model and the base of its audio/realtime variants; GPT-4.1 (April 2025) was the 1M-token non-reasoning workhorse many production apps still pin. Pointing all of them to gpt-6-luna shows OpenAI consolidating the API on the GPT-6 family, and gives developers with fine-tunes three months to migrate.
Sources
2 sources from 1 site. Numbers match the chips in the text.
2 sources: 2 primary
Primary
- OpenAI API deprecations page (2026-10-14 and 2026-10-01 sections)developers.openai.com, docs
- GPT-4o model pagedevelopers.openai.com, docs
Changes
- Filed