Starting Friday, OpenAI willcease providing accessto five legacy ChatGPT models, including the popular but controversial GPT-4o model.
The 4o model has been at the center of a number oflawsuitsconcerning user self-harm, delusional behavior, and AIpsychosis. It remains OpenAI’shighest scoring model for sycophancy.
In addition to GPT-4o, the GPT-5, GPT-4.1, GPT-4.1 mini, and OpenAI o4-mini models have also been deprecated.
OpenAI intended to retire GPT-4o in August, when it unveiled theGPT-5 model. But at the time, there was enough backlash for OpenAI to keep the legacy model available for paid subscribers, who could manually choose to interact with that model. In a recent blog post, OpenAI noted that only 0.1% of customers have been using GPT-4o, but for a company with800 million weekly active users, that small percentage still amounts to 800,000 people.
Thousands of users haverallied against the retirement of 4o, citing their close relationships with the model.
The backlash over OpenAI’s decision to retire GPT-4o shows how dangerous AI companions can be
Source: Techcrunch
