DALL-E leaves ChatGPT on August 30: download your images first

OpenAI is removing the official DALL-E GPT from ChatGPT on August 30. The company announced it on July 31 in the ChatGPT release notes, and the same line now sits in the help article on images in ChatGPT. A GPT here is a preconfigured version of ChatGPT built for one job, in this case generating images. The sentence that matters to you is short: download any images you want to keep before that date.

The DALL-E GPT still works for now. The FAQ in that same help article continues to say you can keep using it if you prefer DALL-E. That leaves you a little over three weeks.

How to save your images

OpenAI does not say what happens to those images after August 30. It only recommends downloading them first. That reticence is exactly why you should not assume everything survives on its own.

Every image you have generated in ChatGPT sits under Images, on the web and in the app. Open one and select Save, and it lands on your device. Copy puts it on your clipboard, and Share sends it to another app. One detail is easy to miss. An image also disappears when you delete the conversation it came from. If you need to track down older images first, the rebuilt search in ChatGPT will find them.

What replaces DALL-E

You can still generate images afterwards, just through ChatGPT Images. That is the built-in image feature running on the newer gpt-image-1 and gpt-image-1-mini models. The help page says ChatGPT Images 2.0 is available on all tiers, free accounts included. The variant with reasoning steps, which OpenAI calls Images with thinking, is limited to Plus, Pro and Business for now, with Enterprise and Edu to follow.

There is some reassurance in the announcement. Custom GPTs that have image generation enabled are not affected by the shutdown.

Developers lost DALL-E back in May

One distinction gets muddled in several reports. The DALL-E models in the API are long gone. OpenAI removed dall-e-2 and dall-e-3 from the API on May 12, 2026, having announced the move in November 2025. What ends now is the last visible DALL-E surface inside ChatGPT.

OpenAI keeps clearing house this month

The DALL-E GPT is not the only thing going. The older o3 model leaves ChatGPT on August 26 after a 90 day sunset period. It was only reachable to paying users through the model picker, and nothing changes in the API. The AI browser ChatGPT Atlas shuts down on August 9, and there too you have to rescue your own data.