OpenAI told nine models to move here — and three of those destinations switch off on 28 September

OpenAI's deprecations page is the most orderly document the company publishes: a shutdown date, a model, and a recommended replacement, in 134 rows going back to 2023. Read down the third column and a pattern appears that no single row shows. The destinations are dying too. On 4 January 2024 the original GPT-3 base models were switched off. The table told `ada` and `babbage` customers to move to `babbage-002`, `curie` customers to `davinci-002`, and the six InstructGPT models — `text-ada-001` through `text-davinci-003` — to `gpt-3.5-turbo-instruct`. Those three destinations all shut down on the same day, 28 September 2026. Nine models were routed into them; everyone who complied packs twice in thirty-three months. It is not confined to the old base line. `gpt-4o` is the recommended replacement in twelve rows, covering the GPT-4 snapshots and the vision previews — and gpt-4o itself goes dark on 23 October 2026. `o1-preview` was pointed at `o3`, which ends on 11 December 2026. `o1-mini` was pointed at `o4-mini`, which ends on 23 October 2026, the same day as gpt-4o. The sharpest case runs backwards. `chatgpt-4o-latest` was deprecated on 18 November 2025 and removed on 17 February 2026, with `gpt-5.1-chat-latest` named as its replacement. That replacement was itself shut down on 23 July 2026 — five months after the model it was supposed to rescue. A developer who migrated on schedule had less than half a year before the same task landed again. None of this is hidden, and none of it is a broken promise: OpenAI's policy commits to notice periods, not to the longevity of whatever the table happens to name. The company also gave the 28 September cohort unusually long warning — the notice went out on 26 September 2025, more than twelve months ahead, against the six months a general model normally gets and the three months a preview gets. But the recommended replacement today is `gpt-5.6-terra`, at 2 dollars per million input tokens and 12 per million output. babbage-002 costs 40 cents on both sides. For a customer who only ever wanted raw text completion, the official route out is five times dearer on input and thirty times dearer on output — while GPT-5 nano, sitting in the same price list at 5 cents per million input tokens, is not mentioned in the table at all. The migration column names a default, not a fit. When babbage-002 and davinci-002 go, the last models descended directly from the GPT-3 base line leave the API with them — six years after that line established what a large language model was, and two migrations after their users were first told to move.