The name that started it all is switched off: OpenAI retires the DALL·E GPT on 30 August

OpenAI has set an end date for the brand that put image generation into everyday language. In its ChatGPT release notes, dated 31 July 2026, the company says that on 30 August 2026 it is retiring the official DALL·E GPT in ChatGPT, and it adds one practical instruction: download any images you want to keep before then. This is a retirement of a product surface, not of the capability. OpenAI points users to ChatGPT Images for creating and editing pictures, and states explicitly that user-created GPTs with image generation enabled are not affected. In other words, the button changes, the pictures keep coming — but the conversation history and the gallery that lived inside the official DALL·E GPT are what users are being asked to rescue. DALL·E was announced in January 2021 and, for roughly two years, was the name most people used for the whole idea of typing a sentence and getting a picture. Its retirement is the end of a naming era rather than a technical event: OpenAI's current image models ship as gpt-image, and the older gpt-image-1, gpt-image-1-mini and gpt-image-1.5 snapshots are themselves scheduled to leave the API on 23 October and 1 December 2026 respectively, with gpt-image-2 as the replacement. For anyone with work stored in that GPT, the deadline is the part that matters. Sixteen days from today, whatever was not downloaded stops being reachable through that entry point.