Claude Opus 4.1 retires Aug 5 — migrate to Opus 4.8 now
Anthropic gives 4.1 users eight days; OpenAI's Assistants API and Sora 2 are next. Here are the cutover dates and drop-in fixes before your calls 404.
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Opus 4.1's final week
`claude-opus-4-1-20250805` stops answering on August 5, 2026 — it was deprecated back on June 5, so this is the end of a two-month window. Anthropic's listed drop-in is `claude-opus-4-8`; Opus 5 is the newer frontier tier if you want the upgrade rather than just the swap.
The Assistants API sunsets Aug 26
OpenAI shuts the Assistants API on August 26, 2026, a year after the notice. The path forward is the Responses + Conversations APIs — if you built on threads and assistant objects, budget for a real rewrite, not a find-and-replace.
Sora 2 and the Videos API go Sept 24
`sora-2`, `sora-2-pro` and the whole Videos API are discontinued September 24, 2026, with no replacement named. If your product generates video through that endpoint, you have roughly two months to stand up another pipeline.
This is already biting
The cliff isn't theoretical: DeepSeek retired the `deepseek-chat` / `deepseek-reasoner` aliases on July 24 (move to V4-Flash/V4-Pro), Anthropic pulled Opus 4.7 fast mode the same day, and OpenAI shut legacy `gpt-5` and `o3` on July 23. Hardcoded model strings are failing right now.
Do this before the dates, not after
Grep your codebase for pinned model IDs and endpoint names, swap them to the named replacements, and re-run your evals against the new models this week. And note: OpenAI's fine-tuning API is also winding down (no new jobs after January 6, 2027), so lean on prompt caching, RAG and structured outputs instead.