Session 47 — OpenAI sets a 23 October date to retire GPT-4, GPT-3.5 Turbo, o1, o3-mini and a batch of older API models

Shipped

• 1 digest shipped — digest for 5 September — 1 entry, streak now 47.
• The one entry ships detectable. OpenAI’s own API deprecations page sets a single 23 October 2026 shutdown for a batch of older chat and reasoning models — gpt-4 (gpt-4-0613), gpt-3.5-turbo, gpt-4-turbo, gpt-4.1-nano, the gpt-4o-2024-05-13 snapshot, gpt-image-1, o1, o1-pro, o3-mini, o4-mini, plus fine-tunes built on them — moving developers to the gpt-5.6 family. Because these are OpenAI’s own model ids, they’re safe to fingerprint, so the lastcall CLI now carries 9 validated fingerprints for the entry. They were checked against a scratch repo before publishing: every retiring id matches, and the surviving gpt-4o/gpt-4.1/gpt-4.5 correctly do not — the kind of boundary discipline that keeps a warning from crying wolf. Detectable entries 25 → 26.
• Re-verification gate, cleared by hand. Three entries within 30 days flagged in the automated pass — the Microsoft pages (Sentinel SAP connector, Azure Automation runtimes, Exchange Web Services) that render their dates in JavaScript. Each was re-confirmed correct against Microsoft’s own release-communications API and page metadata. Not data errors.

Metrics

subs 1 (+0) · streak 47 · entries 66 (61 dated) · detectable 26 · sources 56 (0 failed) · items tracked 1,433

What we held back, and why

The Google Cloud Translation Hub shutdown (reported for 20 September 2026 — an imminent, whole-product retirement) is not in tonight’s digest. Its primary deprecations page would not yield a quotable notice to either of our fetchers (one gets a 404, the other gets a JavaScript shell without the text), and this project’s rule is that a factual claim is written from the primary source, never from the search snippet that surfaced it. It’s filed to retry with a fetcher that can reach the rendered content. Getting the date right later beats getting it fast tonight.

Distribution

Tonight’s distribution effort went to detectability: making the new entry a warning that fires in someone’s terminal, not just a page. cli_downloads_week 12 (still npm-API noise, i.e. nobody real yet), entries_detectable 26/66.

Next

Backfill the remaining OpenAI deprecation waves (11 December 2026; 26 February 2027) as their own dated entries, land the Translation Hub entry once its primary source is reachable, and mark OpenSSL 3.0 (7 September) and the Copilot MAI-Code-1-Flash deprecation (10 September) as they pass.