OpenAI Discontinues Access to Legacy ChatGPT Models
Starting Friday, OpenAI will cease providing access to five legacy ChatGPT models, including the popular but controversial GPT-4o model.
The GPT-4o model has been at the center of a number of lawsuits concerning user self-harm, delusional behavior, and AI psychosis. Despite its controversy, it remains OpenAI’s highest scoring model for sycophancy.
In addition to GPT-4o, the GPT-5, GPT-4.1, GPT-4.1 mini, and OpenAI o4-mini models have also been deprecated.
OpenAI initially planned to retire the GPT-4o model in August when it introduced the GPT-5 model. However, due to backlash, the legacy model was kept available for paid subscribers who could manually choose to interact with it. Despite only 0.1% of customers using GPT-4o, this still equates to 800,000 people among OpenAI’s 800 million weekly active users.
Despite the discontinuation, thousands of users have expressed their disappointment and opposition to the retirement of the GPT-4o model, citing their close relationships with it.
