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The original GPT-5 gets a death date: OpenAI shuts down the August 2025 snapshot on 11 December

OpenAI's deprecation page now carries a line that would have been hard to imagine a year ago: gpt-5-2025-08-07, the snapshot that launched GPT-5, will be shut off on 11 December 2026. The reasoning model o3-2025-04-16 goes the same day. Both point to a single recommended replacement, gpt-5.6-sol. The original GPT-5 will therefore have lived about sixteen months in the API. That is not unusual by current standards, but it is a striking number for a model that was treated as a generational landmark on release, and it says something about how fast the naming has moved: five point-releases have shipped in the time GPT-4 spent as the default. A nearer deadline is already in force. The aliases gpt-5.2-chat-latest and gpt-5.3-chat-latest stop responding on 10 August 2026, four days from now, also redirecting developers to gpt-5.6-sol. Anyone still calling the -chat-latest names has effectively no migration window left. The rest of the autumn calendar is dense. The Assistants API is removed on 26 August, a year after its replacement by the Responses and Conversations APIs was announced. Sora 2, sora-2-pro and the Videos API end on 24 September with no recommended successor at all — the only entry on the list where OpenAI does not name a replacement. The legacy realtime and audio families survive until 20 January 2027. For a catalogue like this one the pattern matters more than any single date: a frontier model is now a product with a service life measured in months, and the profile of a model increasingly needs to record when it stops answering, not just when it launched.