DALL·E 3 (Retired)

DALL·E 3 has been retired. OpenAI stopped offering it for new deployments on 4 March 2026 and shut down both DALL·E 2 and DALL·E 3 on 12 May 2026. Image generation in ChatGPT and on the OpenAI API now runs on GPT Image 2.

What happened to DALL·E 3?

DALL·E 3 launched in 2023 as OpenAI's third-generation diffusion image model, and it was genuinely influential — it was the first widely used generator that reliably followed long, complicated prompts, and its integration into ChatGPT made conversational image editing normal. Its replacement happened in stages. In December 2025 OpenAI quietly swapped the ChatGPT default to GPT Image 1.5. On 21 April 2026 it launched GPT Image 2, sometimes marketed as ChatGPT Images 2.0, and announced that DALL·E 2 and 3 would be retired on 12 May 2026. Developers on the API were given notice to migrate; some pushed back publicly, but the deprecation went ahead.

What replaced it?

• GPT Image 2: OpenAI's current and only image model, released 21 April 2026.
• Autoregressive, not diffusion: Unlike DALL·E, the GPT Image models generate autoregressively, which is what enables their much stronger instruction following.
• Image-to-image transformation: Edit and restyle existing images, not just generate from text.
• Higher accuracy: OpenAI reports prompt accuracy moving from roughly 90–95% with the older pipeline to a claimed 99%.
• Same access points: Available inside ChatGPT across Free, Go, Plus, Pro, Business and Enterprise, and billed per image on the API.

What should you use instead?

If you were using DALL·E 3 inside ChatGPT, you are already using GPT Image 2 — the switch was automatic. If you were calling the API, you needed to migrate to the GPT Image 2 endpoint before 12 May 2026. If you are choosing an image generator fresh, the realistic shortlist in 2026 is GPT Image 2 for instruction following and editing, Midjourney for aesthetic quality, Ideogram for text rendering inside images, Adobe Firefly for commercially safe assets inside Creative Cloud, and FLUX.2 or Stable Diffusion if you want to run the model yourself.

Pricing

DALL·E 3 is no longer sold. Image generation through GPT Image 2 is included with ChatGPT plans — limited on Free, with higher allowances on Go, Plus, Pro, Business and Enterprise — and billed per image on the OpenAI API, with cost scaling by resolution and quality setting.

Bottom Line

DALL·E 3 mattered, and then it was superseded by something better from the same lab. There is no reason to seek it out in 2026: GPT Image 2 does everything DALL·E 3 did, follows instructions far more reliably, and edits existing images. This page remains as a reference for anyone tracing the lineage or planning a migration from a legacy integration.