OpenAI is switching off Whisper's endpoint — and its own guide still sends subtitle work to it

On 26 August 2026 OpenAI put four transcription models on its deprecation list: whisper-1, gpt-4o-transcribe, gpt-4o-mini-transcribe and gpt-4o-transcribe-diarize. All four leave the API on 26 February 2027. The recommended replacements are gpt-transcribe for recorded files and gpt-live-transcribe for live audio. The awkward part is in OpenAI's own documentation. Its transcription guide, checked on 3 September 2026, contains a table of specialised capabilities — and three rows of that table point at models that are now scheduled for shutdown. Speaker-labeled transcripts: use gpt-4o-transcribe-diarize. Word-level timestamps and srt or vtt subtitles: use whisper-1. Translation of a completed recording into English: use whisper-1. The two recommended successors are not listed for any of the three. So the platform is simultaneously recommending these models and removing them, without naming a like-for-like replacement for subtitle timing, speaker separation or speech translation. Anyone running a subtitling pipeline or a meeting-notes product on the OpenAI API has seventeen months to find out whether the successors cover their case, and OpenAI's documentation does not yet say that they do. There is one asymmetry worth spelling out, because it is the whole difference between an open model and a hosted one. Whisper's weights are published under the MIT licence as openai/whisper-large-v3. The shutdown does not touch them. Word timestamps, subtitle formats and English translation keep working on anyone's own hardware, for as long as they care to run them — the thing being switched off is OpenAI's convenience, not the model. The three GPT-4o transcription models have no such fallback: on 26 February 2027 they simply stop existing. Whisper is also still in the price list, at $0.006 per minute — the same rate as gpt-4o-transcribe and a third more than the model OpenAI now recommends. It has been the more expensive option for over a year, and it remains the one the documentation points to for the jobs the cheap model cannot do.