Unanswered questions following gpt-5.3-codex & gpt-5.4 restriction; is it permanent, why are paid users affected, and why was there no communication?
Unanswered Questions from GitHub Issue #14181
---
1. Is this temporary or permanent?
The single most asked question in the entire thread, raised by at least 4 users (yuval-kahan, egormaksgrom2706-create, Asagiry, claell). etraut-openai closed the issue without ever answering it. Nobody knows if free users are locked out forever or if this is a capacity measure that will be reversed.
---
2. Why are paid Business/Pro users also affected?
stargt, Glenn-Domin, svensonic1 and others on paid plans reported the exact same error. etraut-openai deflected by telling them to open a new issue rather than explaining why a restriction supposedly targeting free users is also hitting paying customers.
---
3. Why was there no announcement or communication?
The change was silent — no blog post, no changelog, no in-app notification, nothing. DiscantX put it best: every free user is going to hit this error and have to go digging through forums for answers. aldemirolgun-source pointed out that 5.3 was still set as the default model at the time it broke, meaning users were actively being served a model they could no longer use.
---
4. Why does the official website still advertise gpt-5.3 as available on Free and Go plans?
The feature screenshot on the Codex landing page still shows gpt-5.3 selected under the Free plan. Nobody from OpenAI acknowledged this inconsistency or committed to updating the documentation.
---
5. Why is the error message so unhelpful?
ivanglushko and claell both flagged that the raw API error gives users zero context — no mention of plan restrictions, no prompt to upgrade, no link to documentation. DiscantX noted the UI should at minimum say "upgrade your plan" rather than throwing a cryptic unsupported model error.
---
6. Will the website, docs, and default model selection be updated?
claell asked directly whether OpenAI planned to update the UI, improve the error message, and fix the documentation. No response was given.
13 Comments
Thanks in advance
Potential duplicates detected. Please review them and close your issue if it is a duplicate.
Powered by Codex Action
thank you for the questions, will anyone answer? @openai
it's permanent there's no free lunch & openai isn't google with a lot of money for GPU
What is permanent? I'm on a paid Plus plan and lost access to codex-5.3 and 5.4 yesterday. Now getting ambiguous 'gpt-5.3-codex' model is not supported error message. Codex pricing page still says I should have access to both.
sure we need a certain response
Still awaiting response aswell
same. only reason I bought chatgpt plus was for 5.3/5.4 codex use. this is deceptive if its going to be permanent. scam altman strikes again.
<img width="597" height="457" alt="Image" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/a707bdc1-20c8-40ba-a8c2-ec88c69b8689" />
I mean they have got to work with department of war and oh boy sam got bags full of money so I don't think he cannot deploy gpu servers
Thanks for creating this thorough issue with the still open, and unanswered questions.
Regarding paid users affected: There seem to be #14306 for this, for example. Let's see, how this goes. But definitely, again not communicated well, at all. Reminds me a bit of #11189 (where it was said that OpenAI would learn...).
On the other hand, I can understand that shipping things fast will break things, and sometimes one just needs to do something unpopular to keep services somehow stable. But still, communication should be much better.
Paid users should not be included in this restriction. We've received reports from numerous paid subscription holders that they are having problems accessing
gpt-5.3-codexandgpt-5.4. We're looking into that issue and tracking it in #14331. I'll post details in that thread as updates become available. Apologies for the slow response here. We've been fighting a lot of fires over the past several days.Due to high demand and capacity constraints, we've had to remove access to our latest models (
gpt-5.3-codexandgpt-5.4) for users on the Free plan to ensure that we have sufficient capacity to accommodate our paid subscribers. Free subscribers can still use Codex with gpt-5.2 and other models during our limited-time promotion.Apologies for the poor error message here. We didn't anticipate the need to make this adjustment. It was necessitated by unexpectedly high demand. We've been doing our best to keep the service up and running for everyone during this surge in Codex usage.
@etraut-openai thanks for the response on this. I am aware there was a bug (https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/13568) in the days leading up to this issue that was causing a lot of token usage, so I do hope gpt-5.3-codex might become available again once that bug is fixed as I suspect much of the "demand" may have been due to that bug.