Coming soon to the graveyard: the deprecation schedule for 15 AI products with confirmed death dates. Already announced, just counting down.
Last updated: October 6, 2026 · 📅 Subscribe to the shutdown calendar (.ics)GPT-4.1 launched April 2025 as OpenAI's 'best model for coding' with a 1M-token context window. Azure retires it, plus mini and nano, after 18 months. Fine-tuned deployments on the same bases get a one-year stay of execution.
Sora outlives its maker's own shutdown by three weeks: OpenAI switched its Sora API off on September 24, but Microsoft pushed the Azure retirement from September 15 to October 15, with no replacement. Until then, the last place to generate a Sora video is a Microsoft data centre.
Google's entire Gemini 2.5 family retires on Vertex AI no earlier than October 16, 2026. Note this is Vertex-only — the Gemini Developer API still lists no shutdown date for the same three models.
Azure deletes an entire generation of reasoning models in under 90 days: o3-mini October 1, o4-mini October 16, o1/o1-pro/o3 October 21, codex-mini November 15, o3-pro December 17. Four have no named replacement — Microsoft declares one only 90 to 120 days out, because 'declaring a replacement too early risks directing customers to a model that is no longer the best available option.'
Google Cloud drops managed serving for 13 open models on October 21 — DeepSeek V3.1, GLM-5 and 4.7, gpt-oss-20b, Kimi K2 Thinking, Llama 3.3 70B, MiniMax M2, two e5 embedding models and four Qwen3 variants. You can still run them; you just have to host them yourself.
New organizations can no longer create fine-tuning jobs. The first wave executed on schedule July 23, 2026; the second takes every remaining fine-tuned model — ft-gpt-3.5-turbo, ft-gpt-4, ft-gpt-4.1-nano, ft-babbage-002 and ft-davinci-002 — on October 23.
One date kills three eras. On October 23, OpenAI removes gpt-3.5-turbo (the engine that launched ChatGPT), gpt-4 and gpt-4-0613 (the model that defined 2023), and its entire first generation of reasoning models — o1, o1-pro, o3-mini, o4-mini — plus gpt-4o-2024-05-13 and gpt-image-1. Every fine-tune built on them dies the same day. Seventeen table rows, six months' notice.
Killed by AI in the literal sense. Reddit turns off RSS on November 13 — 'RSS has now become a common surface for large-scale scraping and automated abuse' — stops new public API requests on October 31 and closes the remaining public endpoints in March 2027. The data now goes to paying AI licensees instead; that revenue line grew 24% last quarter.
Google's managed tool-calling framework for Gemini, deprecated with the standard six-month window and switched off after November 26, 2026. The replacement is the Agent Platform — the third name for this idea in as many years.
Anthropic's September 2025 coding model, billed at launch as the best in the world for agents and computer use, retires from the Claude API on November 30 — announced on its first birthday. Opus 4.5 is next in line: 'not sooner than November 24, 2026.'
The visual agent canvas OpenAI unveiled at DevDay 2025 as the centrepiece of AgentKit dies on November 30, along with the Evals platform and the /v1/prompts API. Evals goes read-only on October 31. Agent Builder lasted eight months in beta before its death was announced.
Older GPT Image model snapshots were flagged for removal from the API on December 1, 2026, just months after they replaced DALL·E. The endpoint that buried DALL·E is already on its own deprecation clock.
The original GPT-5 launch snapshots — gpt-5-2025-08-07 and its mini, nano and pro siblings — plus o3 and o3-pro shut down December 11. GPT-5 launched in August 2025 as the 'PhD-level expert' model. Its launch snapshot gets 16 months before it starts returning errors.
OpenAI put its entire GA voice stack on death row: gpt-realtime, gpt-audio, gpt-realtime-mini, gpt-audio-mini and all four gpt-4o audio/realtime variants. gpt-realtime and gpt-audio went GA in August 2025 — the models that headlined 'production-ready voice agents' get roughly 17 months. OpenAI is skipping its own intermediate generation: the 1.5 series shipped in February 2026 and the named replacement is already 2.1.
On August 26 OpenAI deprecated whisper-1 — its original speech-to-text API from March 2023 — together with gpt-4o-transcribe, gpt-4o-mini-transcribe and gpt-4o-transcribe-diarize, the last of which shipped in October 2025. All four die February 26, 2027. The open-source Whisper weights are unaffected; the hosted endpoint that made them a product is not.