Model retirement notice: 6 months GA, 3 months specialized variants, shorter for previews
Catalog row in Vendor License Rules · Cited
- Kind
- Lifecycle
- Statement
- Deprecations page (as retrieved 2026-10-02): unless safety or compliance concerns require a faster timeline, OpenAI gives at least 6 months notice before retiring generally available models and at least 3 months for specialized variants (chat, Codex and deep research variants). Preview models may be retired with much shorter notice, such as 2 weeks, and OpenAI does not recommend them for business-critical production workloads. Customers actively using the model are notified by email.
- Applies when
- OpenAI announces the deprecation of a model.
- Applies to
- OpenAI API models