War for Audience: OpenAI Lifts Limits in Free ChatGPT and Purges Old API Models

Dumping is spreading to individual users. On August 9, 2026, OpenAI announced the complete lifting of text message limits for the free tier of ChatGPT. Simultaneously, the company launched the process of retiring the old GPT-5.2 and GPT-5.3 models from its API (starting August 10).

The synchronicity of these actions reveals strict infrastructural austerity. Faced with a massive exodus of users to competitors' free open-source solutions, Sam Altman is forced to give away inference for free. However, to prevent servers from crashing under the load (as happened with Kimi K3), OpenAI is aggressively "killing" support for legacy models. Forcing developers onto the current GPT-5.6 version allows the corporation to consolidate compute capacity and reduce OPEX on maintaining outdated architecture. The B2C market has definitively become a scorched-earth battlefield, where the winner will be the one with enough money to pay the electricity bills the longest.

Source: OpenAI / Kingy AI