OpenAI Sets December 11 Shutdown for Custom GPTs, With October Creation Freeze
The company's migration FAQ commits to a hard retirement date for the build-your-own assistants, and warns that custom actions — the piece wiring GPTs to booking calendars and CRMs — will not transfer automatically.
OpenAI will retire custom GPTs on December 11, 2026, according to its migration FAQ, with a February 11, 2027 extension available only to Enterprise workspaces that qualify for and receive an approved deferral. The September 11 ChatGPT release notes describe the plan bluntly: “to retire custom GPTs across ChatGPT plans.”
The company will stop new custom GPT creation on October 26. Personal accounts, per mixed-news.com, have already had creation and publishing frozen. Existing GPTs keep working until the shutdown.
The consequential detail sits deeper in the FAQ. “GPT custom actions do not transfer through the migration workflow.” Custom actions are the piece that hooked a build-your-own assistant to an external service, a booking calendar, a CRM, an order lookup. Any GPT wired to one of those has to be rebuilt on top of a supported plugin or a custom MCP server. It doesn’t carry across.
Nor does much else. Existing conversations don’t migrate. The selected model isn’t retained. Sharing settings reset, and the migrated plugin starts private, so prior users of the original GPT don’t automatically get access to the replacement. A popular third-party GPT that happened to live inside someone else’s Enterprise workspace can go dark on December 11 regardless of the viewer’s plan.
PCWorld points to ChatGPT Projects as a lighter destination for the simpler cases: paste in the instructions, upload knowledge files, import prior conversations. Projects have no public marketplace and no shareable GPT link, which means anything that was doing lead capture or intake through a link isn’t solved by moving there.
The GPT Store launched alongside the custom GPT format in late 2023 as an open marketplace of user-built assistants. What replaces it’s a plugin-and-skills surface OpenAI curates directly, arriving in the same weeks as its sponsored-agents rollout inside ChatGPT. The build-your-own era is being folded back into the platform that hosted it.
Sources
- https://help.openai.com/en/articles/20001519-custom-gpt-retirement-and-migration-faq
- https://help.openai.com/en/articles/6825453-chatgpt-release-notes
- https://www.pcworld.com/article/3238025/custom-gpts-in-chatgpt-are-going-away-heres-how-to-save-yours.html
- https://mixed-news.com/en/openai-retiring-custom-gpts-what-carries-over-to-plugins/
- https://www.gsmdome.com/openai-to-retire-custom-gpts-on-december-11-2026-shifting-users-to-plugins-and-skills
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