OpenAI DALL-E 2 and DALL-E 3 APIs Shut Down on May 12
OpenAI
OpenAI's DALL-E 2 and DALL-E 3 API endpoints were permanently shut down on May 12, 2026 as scheduled in the deprecation notice issued November 2025. After the cutoff, requests using the dall-e-2 or dall-e-3 model strings return errors with no automatic fallback. OpenAI recommends migration to gpt-image-1.5 or gpt-image-1-mini as replacements.
Why it matters
DALL-E 3 was the dominant image generation API for thousands of third-party products; the hard cutoff forces all dependent apps to migrate to gpt-image-1.x, which has a different request/response schema — a non-trivial engineering change for developers who integrated deeply with DALL-E.
Importance: 2/5
DALL-E 2/3 API hard cutoff — forces migration for all dependent third-party apps