OpenAI announced on July 31 that the DALL-E GPT interface will be fully retired on August 30, giving users roughly 30 days to save their work and migrate to the replacement feature called ChatGPT Images. The dedicated image generation tool is being permanently removed, and users must download saved images before the cutoff. ChatGPT Images runs on OpenAI’s newer gpt-image-1 and gpt-image-1-mini models, first introduced in November 2025, with OpenAI steering users toward them since December. The underlying DALL-E-2 and DALL-E-3 model snapshots in the OpenAI API were already scheduled for deprecation by May 12, 2026. User-created GPTs with image generation capabilities will continue to function. OpenAI is consolidating its image generation stack around fewer models, representing a shift toward tighter text-image integration. The AI community has reacted negatively to abrupt deprecation notices with limited lead time, which erode goodwill among power users and developers. Every forced migration lowers switching costs for competitors, and OpenAI is moving toward mapping different image generation tiers, such as gpt-image-1 versus gpt-image-1-mini, to different subscription levels.