OpenAI's model catalogue still advertises eight models that stopped answering — one of them 13 months ago

OpenAI's public catalogue of models for developers lists 96 entries. Eight of them are models that, according to the company's own deprecations table, no longer answer at all. The list is short enough to print. gpt-4.5-preview was switched off on 14 July 2025. o1-preview followed on 28 July 2025. o1-mini and both moderation entries — text-moderation-latest and text-moderation-stable, two catalogue rows for the same model — went dark on 27 October 2025. codex-mini-latest ended on 12 February 2026, chatgpt-4o-latest on 17 February 2026, and gpt-4-turbo-preview on 26 March 2026. The oldest of them has been sitting in the catalogue as a live product for thirteen months. Only one of the eight admits it. gpt-4.5-preview is described as a "deprecated large model"; the other seven read exactly like an offer. o1-preview is a "preview of our first o-series reasoning model", chatgpt-4o-latest is "the GPT-4o model used in ChatGPT" — present tense, for a model that has not been used in ChatGPT since February. Nothing in those descriptions distinguishes them from the models that work. The detail that turns an editorial slip into a practical problem is what the individual model pages still carry. The page for gpt-4-turbo-preview publishes a full commercial card: 10 dollars per million input tokens and 30 per million output, a rate-limit table for tiers 1 through 5, and a side-by-side comparison against GPT-4o mini and o3-mini. A developer who arrives there from a search engine — rather than from the deprecations page the catalogue mentions once in its preamble — has no signal that the model has been off since March. One of the eight also points at a replacement that does not exist under the name given. The deprecations table sends codex-mini-latest users to gpt-5-codex-mini; the catalogue has no such entry. What it does have is GPT-5.1-Codex mini, which is presumably the same intention with a different name — but the reader is left to make that leap. We checked two claims that looked like they belonged on this list and do not. babbage-002 and davinci-002 appear in the deprecations table with a 2024 date, but that row withdraws the ability to fine-tune them, not the models themselves; both still answer. The distinction matters here, because it is exactly the kind of ambiguity that makes a catalogue of 96 entries hard to audit — including for the company that publishes it.