OpenAI to retire the DALL·E GPT from ChatGPT on August 30

OpenAI will retire the official DALL·E GPT inside ChatGPT on August 30, 2026, according to a July 31 entry in its ChatGPT release notes, pointing users toward ChatGPT Images for future image generation and editing.

What's new

The release notes state plainly: "On August 30, 2026, we're retiring the official DALL·E GPT in ChatGPT. We encourage you to download any images you want to keep before then." OpenAI directs users who want to keep creating or editing images to use ChatGPT Images instead, and clarifies the change is scoped narrowly: "User-created GPTs with image generation enabled are not affected." Only the official, OpenAI-run DALL·E GPT is being shut down; third-party GPTs that call image generation continue to work.

The DALL·E GPT has functioned as a dedicated, purpose-built chat interface for OpenAI's image model inside the GPT store and GPT picker, separate from the general-purpose ChatGPT Images capability that now handles image generation and editing directly inside any ChatGPT conversation.

Context

This is the latest in a series of legacy-surface cleanups OpenAI has run through its ChatGPT release notes in 2026, alongside a separate scheduled removal of nine legacy audio, realtime, and transcription models from the API. As ChatGPT's native image tooling has matured, a standalone DALL·E-branded GPT has become redundant with capabilities already built into the core chat experience, following the same pattern OpenAI used when it folded earlier standalone tools into unified product surfaces.

Why it matters

On its own, retiring one GPT is a minor product change, but it is a useful marker of how OpenAI is consolidating its image-generation surface area: rather than maintaining a separate branded entry point for DALL·E, image creation and editing now lives natively in ChatGPT Images. Users who have relied on the DALL·E GPT specifically — for saved conversation history, custom instructions, or workflow habits built around that GPT — have a one-month window to migrate and download existing images before the retirement takes effect.