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AI Model Deprecation Statistics: 2026 Report

By Darin ten Bruggencate, Founder, AI Industry Reviews · Published October 8, 2026

AI companies regularly deprecate older models, which means they announce a date when a model will stop working. Any app still using that model breaks on that date unless its developers switch to a newer one, so the amount of warning a vendor gives matters to every team building on these APIs.

Our analysts studied six platforms: the OpenAI API, Anthropic's Claude API, Google's Gemini API and Vertex AI, Mistral's API and Amazon Bedrock. We collected the announcement and shutdown dates for 283 models from each platform's own deprecation pages on October 8, 2026. We then measured how much notice each vendor gives before a shutdown and how long models stay available after release. OpenAI's median notice was 182 days, close to six months, while Anthropic's was 63 days.

In the following sections, we compare the notice each platform promises with the notice it gives, then look at how notice periods have changed since 2023, how long models stay available, and why the same model can shut down on different dates on different cloud platforms.

Stated Minimum Notice Before an AI Model Is Retired

Minimum Retirement Notice Stated by Each Platform, as of October 8, 2026

• OpenAI and Amazon Bedrock both set six months as the standard notice for regular models. Anthropic's stated minimum of 60 days is about one-third as long.
• For developers building on AI models, the provider sets how much time they get to migrate. OpenAI and Amazon Bedrock promise six months, while Anthropic's minimum is 60 days. Teams relying on shorter-notice providers should plan migrations as a routine cost.

AI Model Deprecation Notice Periods by Vendor

Days From Deprecation Notice to Shutdown, by Platform

• OpenAI's median notice was 182 days, close to six months. Three in four OpenAI models got 180 days or more.
• Each of the 12 Amazon Bedrock models spent 181 to 185 days in the Legacy state before its end-of-life date.
• Anthropic's median notice was 63 days, and Mistral's was 70 days.
• Mistral gave the shortest notice of any platform. Its table lists June 6, 2025 as both the deprecation date and the retirement date for Codestral Mamba (open-codestral-mamba).
• OpenAI's shortest notices were 3 days for three Codex models (code-davinci-001, code-cushman-001 and code-cushman-002), announced March 20, 2023 and shut down March 23, 2023, and 20 days for gpt-5.4-cyber, announced September 11, 2026 and removed October 1, 2026.
• Actual notice periods follow each vendor's stated policy, with a few sharp exceptions. OpenAI's median was 182 days and Anthropic's 63, while Mistral once retired a model on the day it was deprecated. Companies with critical workloads are likely to favor providers with longer, predictable notice.

How AI Model Deprecation Notice Has Changed Since 2023

Median Deprecation Notice by Year Announced

• Anthropic's four deprecation notices in 2026 gave 60, 62, 61 and 61 days, all within two days of its 60-day minimum. In 2025 its notices ranged from 62 days for Claude Haiku 3.5 to 189 days for Claude Opus 3.
• Mistral's three notices from late 2025 each gave 30 days or less. Notices dated October 31, November 6 and December 2, 2025 covered 13 models and gave 30, 24 and 29 days.
• Mistral's 2026 median rose to 91.5 days, but its September 29, 2026 notice retired labs-leanstral-1-5 and mistral-ocr-4-0 the next day, September 30, 2026.
• Notice periods are becoming more predictable, though not always longer. Anthropic's 2026 notices all landed within two days of its 60-day minimum, and five of OpenAI's nine gave 182 to 184 days. Developers can now plan around each vendor's standard, but shorter-notice providers are unlikely to lengthen it on their own.

AI Model Lifespan From Release to Shutdown

Days From Release to Shutdown, Retired and Scheduled Models

• Preview models on Google's Gemini API had a median lifespan of 217 days, and 28 of 33 were shut down or scheduled to shut down within 12 months of release. The shortest was gemini-3.1-flash-lite-preview, released March 3, 2026 and shut down May 25, 2026, 83 days later.
• Stable Gemini API models had a median lifespan of 433 days, about twice that of preview models.
• Vertex AI retired gemini-1.5-pro-001, gemini-1.5-pro-002, gemini-1.5-flash-001 and gemini-1.5-flash-002 exactly 365 days after release.
• The two shortest Vertex AI lifespans belong to newer models that Vertex lists in its table for shorter availability periods. Vertex's gemini-3.6-flash, released July 21, 2026, retires November 19, 2026, after 121 days, and gemini-3.7-flash retires after 168 days.
• The four longest lifespans belong to embedding models. Vertex AI's multimodalembedding@001, released February 12, 2024, retires April 1, 2027, 1,144 days later.
• Claude Opus 4.1 and Claude Sonnet 3.7 were retired 365 days after the dates in their model names. Claude Haiku 3 lasted 774 days, the longest of the Anthropic models.
• Preview models are short-lived and risky to build on. Preview Gemini models had a median lifespan of 217 days, about half that of stable models at 433. Teams building production systems are likely to stick with stable releases.

AI Model Deprecation Statistics by Year

Model Shutdowns by Year, by Platform

• The six platforms shut down 99 models from January 1 to October 8, 2026, more than in all of 2025. Another 70 shutdowns are scheduled for later dates.
• OpenAI shut down 29 of its 34 models retired in 2024 on a single day, January 4, 2024. That day it retired older GPT-3 and GPT-3.5 completion models, its edit models and its first-generation text embedding models.
• Model retirements are speeding up, which raises migration work for every AI customer. The six platforms shut down 99 models through October 8, 2026, more than all of 2025, with 70 more scheduled. If this pace holds, companies will need to budget for more frequent model changes.

Same Model, Different Shutdown Dates on Cloud Platforms

Shutdown Dates for the Same Model on Two Platforms

• Anthropic and Amazon Bedrock both list shutdown dates for three Claude models, and each stays on Bedrock 121 to 156 days longer than on Anthropic's own API.
• Of 18 OpenAI model snapshots with a shutdown date on both OpenAI's API and Microsoft's Azure OpenAI schedule, 13 stay available longer on Azure and 5 shut down earlier there. The median gap is 27 days later on Azure.
• Cloud platforms can buy developers extra time on retiring models. Claude models stay on Bedrock 121 to 156 days longer than on Anthropic's API, and 13 of 18 OpenAI snapshots stay longer on Azure. Companies that need stability may find it worth running models through a cloud provider.

What AI Model Deprecation Trends Mean for 2027 and Beyond

AI models are being shut down faster than ever, and the notice given varies a lot between providers. Any company that builds on these models now has to switch to new ones as a routine chore, and a short notice period can leave a product broken until the change is made.

As vendors release new models more often, the old ones will keep retiring sooner. Cloud platforms sometimes keep models running after the original developer drops them, which can buy time, but preview models remain the most likely to disappear early. Teams that plan for change will spend far less effort than those caught by surprise.

So if your product depends on a specific AI model, track its retirement date and build your code so that swapping in a new model takes days, not months.