One OpenAI announcement, two deadlines: some models got six months to move, others three

On 22 April 2026 OpenAI published a single deprecation notice covering more than two dozen models. It carried two different shutdown dates. Fourteen models went dark on 23 July 2026. The rest run until 23 October 2026. Today, 20 August, sits neatly between the two — one half of that announcement is already history, the other half is still serving traffic. The split is not arbitrary, and OpenAI documents the rule. Generally available models get at least six months of notice. Specialised variants of those models get at least three. Preview models, identified by the word preview in their name, may be retired with as little as two weeks, and OpenAI explicitly advises against using them for business-critical work. What counts as a specialised variant is the interesting part. The company's own examples are chat variants such as gpt-5.1-chat-latest, Codex variants such as gpt-5.3-codex, and deep research variants such as o3-deep-research. On paper these are settings on a familiar base model. In practice they were sold as separate products, with their own model cards, their own pricing and their own API identifiers — and the July group included both deep research models, four Codex models and three chat models. The contrast within one announcement is sharp. o1-pro and o3-deep-research were deprecated on the same day. o1-pro, a generally available model, runs until 23 October. o3-deep-research, classed as a variant, was switched off on 23 July. Same notice, twice the runway for one of them. Two things are worth saying plainly. First, these are minimums, not promises of equal treatment: o1-mini was given six months in 2025 while o1-preview, announced the same day, got three. Second, none of this is hidden — the policy sits at the top of OpenAI's deprecations page, above the tables. The cost falls on whoever builds a product on a variant without reading it. wujec.ai has just added profiles for the six missing o-series reasoning models, including both deep research models and both pro-tier models, each with its announced shutdown date. They now appear in the catalogue's lifecycle timeline alongside the models that outlived them.