For now, the changes should help placate users who felt frustrated by the sudden shift to GPT-5 and deprecation of OpenAI's older LLMs.

OpenAI has walked back a controversial decision from last week that removed user access to older ChatGPT models when GPT-5 became the new default. Following a surge of complaints across forums and social media, legacy models like GPT-4o, GPT-4.1, o3, and o4-mini are once again available—but only for paid users who know where to look.

OpenAI launched its most advanced language model Thursday with the release of GPT-5, a flagship product the company says will enhance ChatGPT as it reportedly nears a $500 billion valuation and aims to stave off competitors in Google, Anthropic and more.