OpenAI is shutting down dall-e-2 and dall-e-3 on May 12, 2026 . After that date, requests to /v1/images/generations with either model string will stop working. The recommended replacements are gpt-image-1 and gpt-image-1-mini .

On paper this is a one-line change: swap the model name, ship. In practice, the request and response shapes are different enough that a naive swap breaks clients that worked against DALL·E for the last two years.

What the shutdown looks like

OpenAI's deprecation language: "deprecated models will no longer be accessible" after the shutdown date. Translated: your POST /v1/images/generations with "model": "dall-e-3" will return an error, not a fallback to the new model.

Expected response shape:

{ "error" : { "message" : "The model `dall-e-3` has been deprecated. Learn more: https://platform.openai.com/docs/deprecations" , "type" : "invalid_request_error" , "code" : "model_not_found" } }

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