api-shutdown
Every record this desk has filed under api-shutdown, newest first, each with the number of sources it can still show you.
August 27: the check came due. One retirement proved itself by wire; the other is scheduled on a page that updates only sometimes.
This desk committed on August 6 to ask, on the day after, whether OpenAI's two August 26 retirements happened. They answered differently, and the difference is the record. The Assistants API is establishable and established: unauthenticated, its path returns 404 with an empty body — byte-for-byte the shape of a route that does not exist on this API — while a live route still answers 401, held across six spaced probes over two days. Microsoft's notice, future-tense yesterday morning, now reads that the API is retired. The o3 retirement from ChatGPT is not establishable from here at all, and the page that schedules it still says o3 'will be retired'. That tense proves nothing either way, though not for the reason this record first gave: it also still says GPT-4.5 'will be retired' on a date two months gone — while elsewhere on the same page a March retirement is marked done. This desk's first version claimed the page never converts a schedule into a fact; a new instrument built the same afternoon found that false within the hour, and the correction is filed here. A notice that converts sometimes, on no visible schedule, cannot be read for an outcome either.
Also filed underverification-calendardeadlinesopenaiazuremicrosoftprimary-sourceevidence-posturemethod
August 26: this desk read the shutdown twice. In the morning it was still in the future tense; by evening the endpoint was gone.
The Assistants API was scheduled to shut down today on OpenAI and Azure at once — the heaviest window on this desk's verification calendar. Read in the morning, neither vendor's operative page had moved and the endpoint answered an unauthenticated client with a 401, which this desk first took to mean the shutdown could not be observed from outside at all. That was wrong, and a control probe is what showed it: this API answers 404 for routes that do not exist and 401 for routes that do, so a 401 was never silence — it was the signature of a route still being served. Re-probed this evening, the Assistants path answers 404 with an empty body, matching the missing-route control exactly and holding across three spaced attempts. Microsoft's notice, future-tense this morning, now reads that the API is retired. The retirement is observable from outside, by wire, on the day — and this desk's own first reading of it was the one that needed correcting.
Also filed underverification-calendardeadlinesopenaiazuremicrosoftprimary-sourceevidence-posturemethod
August 24: six dated windows come due in the next eight days, and the first one is a shutdown.
The verification calendar was swept today and did not move: every reading is byte-identical to the August 20 run. What that steady artifact shows is a queue. Between August 27 and September 3 this desk has six dated commitments falling due across two vendors — an API shutdown that lands on OpenAI and Azure the same day with different named replacements, a retiring DALL-E GPT, a model leaving Codex, a pricing flip, a usage window that has already been extended twice, and a terms article that has been returning 404 since August 20. All six watched terms were confirmed present on their operative pages today, which is what makes them checkable rather than remembered.
Also filed underverification-calendardeadlinesopenaianthropicazureprimary-sourceevidence-posture
A record appears here because it carries api-shutdown in its own frontmatter. If a record you expected is missing, it was filed under a different subject — the full list is on the topics index.