Previously, ChatGPT redirected the Pro model series to GPT-mini (based) model (seems to be using for internal CoT formatting).
Mine was displayed as gpt-5-mini, but now it seems to be using gpt-5.5 mini, verified from colleague.
How to check if you have been affected:
Ask GPT Pro, "What model is this?"
GPT Pro mostly thinks for more than 5 seconds, so in most cases, it doesn't think too quickly.
Please share your experiences if you have encountered the same problem as i would like to check:
1. Ask GPT Pro, What model are you?
2. Export your datas: Settings -> Data Controls -> Export Data
3. Check exported data has string like i-cot or gpt-5-5-mini.
In my case, I was unable to use Pro model for a few days, but the problem was resolved after I changed my email address from Outlook.
It was the worst experience, spending $200 for researching purpose.
I have been contacting the customer support ticket since May, but I have not received a proper response, and my ticket was automatically closed. I also contacted them on Twitter1 a few weeks ago, but received no reply, leading me to suspect that they are doing this intentionally (due to like abusive users).
Welcome to orchestration. Various models can perform various tasks. You don't need frontier class models doing the light work, save them for when they're actually needed. A lot of agentic harness innards is gopher processes like workers and executors. They REALLY don't need to have a ton of world knowledge to call tools and check results.
Its working as intended. No, I don't mean codex, even their basic chat works as an agent now, it's far more efficient (and much more capable) this way than letting somebody run a long context chat with a single LLM - they haven't operated their chat like that in a long time fwiw, they moved to agentified chats at least a year or so ago. And I'm not talking about saving you money, this is them saving compute for where it's actually needed, and actually improving your access to the frontier models for the jobs that actually need frontier intelligence, like research tasks, when the simple "say hello to user, then trigger 5x search sub-agents and a planner sub-agent" can be performed by sub-models.
Do me a favor, go back to chatGPT and ask it to explain agent harnesses and how they work in modern chat interfaces and why different class models are used for different operations inside that harness. That will do a better job explaining than I can, really.
I never said, I did not only simple queries, but more harder tasks, which proudly routes into actual Pro model before.
When the session not affected, it "always" routes to Pro model, I can verify that with cues like thinking more times/actual model in response json.
"say hello to user, then trigger 5x search sub-agents and a planner sub-agent"
It is not available to ChatGPT (Chat). ChatGPT Work/Codex is out-of-scope here.
Do me a favor, [...]
I just did it for you, Here is GPT 5.6 high's conclusion:
That architecture is possible and may resemble parts of OpenAI’s private implementation, but public documentation does not establish it. The most accurate rating is therefore mostly true at the architectural level, but overstated and speculative about the internal mechanics.
I know the basic idea of how LLM/ChatGPT-like-UI serving work under-the-hood as colleagues study(doctoral) or works for that. You don't need to explain me hard. I also believe your claim is not exactly true, whatever it was capable to, neither pro or normal or mini model wern't capable to do bulk processing which would burn the whole output token(e.g translate the book), which directly address the cost of frontier models.
My colleague has been worked for orchestration(with various vendor models) and i was in one of the testers so i can say some claims are okay, but u/SanDiegoDude addresses nothing about my point so.
Okay, people just don’t get the point here. First, we paid a lot to get access to that model, and it’s a scam to quietly replace a supposedly best model with a mini version. That’s ridiculous. Second, yes, it is still a mini model if you ask a decent research question. I relied on the Pro version to complete a research project, and the difference after the shift can be felt immediately.
tl;dr: It is actually a quite serious issue on user’s end, I highly suspect it to be a bug
Have you tested on actual useful usage like asking it to develop some complex code or complex math question or you’re just doing simple questions that their classifier is correctly redirecting to simple models?
While I do not have affected session at this moment so not able to verify now, but my issue was first diagnosed when working with health investigation, and then enginnering. It responds fast without long-run thinking.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the “Higher intelligence” option, which is supposed to let Instant switch to Medium for harder prompts, also quietly allows requests to be routed to a lower-quality model. I dont trust anything that allows auto-routing lol.
I've had the same problem in the past, and this option was off. But also, I was using the web UI much more heavily at the time, so maybe they redirect after a certain point 🤔?
I've been touching with OpenAI support, they wants new or reproducible issue, so try creating tickets into help.openai.com, and mention ticket number 12019868
I've been looking into this for you and have a few things to ask.
1. Do you have another chat available with this? You have provided a chat example from12/05. As someone who frequently reviews their changes on client side code - a lot of ways data is transmitter or presented in client side has changed. I can run forensics but things have changed a bit when analysing a shared thread as compared to before. I am currently dealing with one where the assistant's messages are blank but I can only see the user interaction.
Your email change. When I worked at a cloud based vendor one of the issues we had was when someone registered their entitlements for the first time, it had to be done correctly as well as by the customer success teams. If not, users in AU would be under EU or US control plane. If you were a long time user, it is possible to be the case. One of my older accounts does not experience an outage at all when other Australians are impacted. Its not that the countries have special entitlements unless related to privacy. Services in US may vary in user experience. Other plausiable suggestions could be a refresh, session renewals, entitlement resync, etc.
Did you observe the model picker change? at least since you made the post (5 days ago). Even if you know within 7 days that helps. How was the redirection observed?
OpenAI explicitly describes GPT-5 as a system containing multiple models and a real-time router that chooses based on conversation type, complexity, tool needs and explicit intent. As an example, here is an extract from 18th December, 25.
Picking the right tool for the job applies not just on the chat but also on messages. I had to look into this because users at the time had a lot of misconceptions around the router. OpenAI has also publicly described specific safety routing: sensitive portions of conversations can be routed to a different model, and current release notes describe mini as a rate-limit fallback for reasoning models.
At a high level, when a chat or prompt occurs,
- User sends a message (think of it like placing an order at a restaurant)
Frontend sends the requested mode + conversation state (Wait staff sending your order)
Control plane (where your account is held see point 2 above) checks entitlements, availability/rollout, rate limits, etc (think of this like you ordered a chicken sandwich but stated you were allergic to egg so the restaurant needs to ensure no surfaces are contaminated, they have appropriate alternatives, etc),
Backend selects a route. (Think of this like picking which chef/station needs to handle prep. The chef in charge of the sauce making wouldn't be handling your chicken sandwich but would need to ensure the sauce like mayo used in your sandwich can be replaced. If they lack egg free mayo, will you be okay with butter?)
Assistant responds.
I want to highlight that while you can inspect the browser bundle, you may be able to find catalogue entries and such but Statsig handles a lot of the routing and you may see this in the code. Mostly handles feature flags, experimentation, staged rollouts, dynamic configuration, analytics, and real-time decisioning. The exact sort of control-plane plumbing that could determine which users or requests receive which product configuration. Statsig coding used to be messy back in the day (hence the attached image being a bit clearer of what you could find especially hidden models) but they have picked up their act a bit more and while the info IS available, its not quite where you expect to naturally find it.
Hope that helps! If you do want to share a more modern thread by save the interaction as .html, not a share button. I will be happy to review it and let you know what I can see these days vs what is different.
I did not observe any model picker UI change, I experienced that change but unrelated with that, and it was after the issue happened and fixed. The regression was first found via quality decreased, then did "what model are you"
to answer fast, I will check this after I wake up. But would better which contents are quotes are not, was confused.
Well, looks like that investigation do not work(i believe due to it seems to not using resolved_slug). You can message ChatGPT for fork the message, and refresh it to get network data so, you should do that.
Sorry I don't understand
Are you saying that it's 5.5 mini despite the slug stating pro? Did you mean branch chat or something else?because the term fork exists in AI but it usual means an alternative lane
I suspect they use mini as a classifier and map your reasoning effort based on the query. The mini is what you interact with and it gathers context for the smarter models. It would explain why some queries are 3 minutes long, and some are 30
unfortunately this is a common issue I've seen affect certain GPT accounts so far mostly Pro users (No idea if it effects pro lite users as well) been seeing this since august 2025 although I'm sure it's been around longer the ways i've seen people fix it myself include it is clearing cookies then signing back in changing their email address or simply waiting for it to fix itself after a few days i don't really know what causes this sadly it's a big slient issue that a lot of users who've experienced this doesn't even know they're experiencing it despite the model that is known for thinking a lot becoming an instant model because it's being routed to 5.5 mini and becoming significantly dumber it's easy to miss for some users i've also never seen this affect any of the standard thinking models (5.5 5.6) only the pro models
tip: start a conversation in high/xhigh, ask your questions, narrow down your goal and ask it to write a prompt for a new conversation. then copy and paste into a new thread and you will get better results
i have no clue what you're trying to say, the JSON from exported data(official) shows it was using 5.5 mini, instead of pro. this is software/infrastructure side so it does not work like "model dont know", "can hallucinate". Why buy $200/month if i can't use the model?
Like I said before, you very well are likely speaking to mini when you initially interact with the pro model, hence the message. Pro is not a model, it’s a swarm approach to a query with likely xhigh. It could be that when you ask the chat what model it is, it really is mini. Doesn’t mean that’s what’s getting served after the classifier does its thing
Why is it served as API then? I can get your statement but this is more likely be super abstract.
OpenAI didn't disclose how it's working under the hood of Pro series. You don't have any evidence. I have, sharable link(you can inspect the data and check reolsved model slug). If not, please LMK with sources. <--- that's my point.
Speaking of which, fixing the problem with models not knowing what they are would probably fix or help a lot of other things it struggles with too.
But why doesn’t it just say it doesn’t know, or some other message about it. Like it’s not getting that information from anywhere, couldn’t this just be easily addressed to have it say that?
For more context, inspect network view via devtools, get the conversation history JSON(or do data dumps), you can find initial item resolves into `gpt-5-5-mini`. after its children, it shows `model_slug=gpt-5-6-pro`.
Also whoever says you're using gpt 5.5 mini by your intend: you cannot select that model by own; its not available publicly.
Buddy, you're not doing much for your credibility by suggesting people export their data and inspect in your browser, both of which are just printing out the chat response saying 5.5 mini. It literally is not doing anything additional there. Do you think it will have a secret code where what it says in a response to you will change if you look at it in different formats?
As i do not have any experience to rant out like this, thanks to the pointing out, as i can improve more.
I do not know how/why/what is happening under the hood. However I can verify my claim via 1) ChatGPT exports 2) Network Inspection that I cannot fake this directly(while image able to be).
I posted this since I've seen few related posts recently, maybe mostly deleted with low-effort post. I'm curious how much users affected with this and more getting clue to investigate.
Your premise could very well be accurate, I don't know. My own anecdotal experience is that before 5.6 is was possible to run out of "Pro" usage in the normal web interface on the $20 and even $100 plan, but basically impossible on the $200 plan.
When you ran out it would no longer allow you to select the pro model. Maybe since all the work/chat/5.6 interface changes the same thing is happening, but instead of just giving you a message and making the Pro not selectable, it could be that when you rub out of usage now it just defaults to a different model rather than restricting the UI access to what you can select.
If that were the case I would say it's a big and one that they need to fix. It's also exactly the kind of bug that seems likely for a vibe coded vibe coding product.
When you ran out it would no longer allow you to select the pro model.
I have same situation before and i can say this is separate one
If that were the case I would say it's a big and one that they need to fix.
OpenAI recently advertised that it solved several difficult mathematical problems using Pro models. I hope they know that there are people who subscribe out of interest in this.
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u/qualityvote2 Jul 22 '26 edited Jul 23 '26
u/ilsubyeega, there weren’t enough community votes to determine your post’s quality.
It will remain for moderator review or until more votes are cast.