On February 13, 2026, alongside the previously announced retirement of GPT‑5 (Instant and Thinking), we will retire GPT‑4o, GPT‑4.1, GPT‑4.1 mini, and OpenAI o4-mini from ChatGPT. In the API, there are no changes at this time.
While this announcement applies to several older models, GPT‑4o deserves special context.
After we first deprecated it and later restored access during the GPT‑5 release, we learned more about how people actually use it day to day. We brought GPT‑4o back after hearing clear feedback from a subset of Plus and Pro users, who told us they needed more time to transition key use cases, like creative ideation, and that they preferred GPT‑4o’s conversational style and warmth.
That feedback directly shaped GPT‑5.1 and GPT‑5.2, with improvements to personality, stronger support for creative ideation, and more ways to customize how ChatGPT responds(opens in a new window). You can choose from base styles and tones like Friendly, and controls for things like warmth and enthusiasm. Our goal is to give people more control and customization over how ChatGPT feels to use—not just what it can do.
We’re announcing the upcoming retirement of GPT‑4o today because these improvements are now in place, and because the vast majority of usage has shifted to GPT‑5.2, with only 0.1% of users still choosing GPT‑4o each day.
More broadly, we’re continuing to improve ChatGPT across areas users have told us need work. This includes further improvements to personality and creativity, as well as addressing unnecessary refusals and overly cautious or preachy responses, with updates coming soon. We’re continuing to make progress toward a version of ChatGPT designed for adults over 18, grounded in the principle of treating adults like adults, and expanding user choice and freedom within appropriate safeguards. To support this, we’ve rolled out age prediction(opens in a new window) for users under 18 in most markets.
Changes like this take time to adjust to, and we’ll always be clear about what’s changing and when. We know that losing access to GPT‑4o will feel frustrating for some users, and we didn’t make this decision lightly. Retiring models is never easy, but it allows us to focus on improving the models most people use today.
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