OpenAI opens a version of ChatGPT for teens and retires the DALL·E generator

Two announcements in the same round of release notes point in one direction: the company behind ChatGPT is expanding its footprint into education while shutting down one of its longstanding tools. It should be noted at the outset that the information currently comes from a single source (OpenAI’s official communications, release notes and company announcement); no independent confirmation is available.

A product for teenagers

OpenAI has announced the launch of ChatGPT for Teens, a dedicated experience for teenagers built around learning. According to the company, the product includes built-in protections for minors, features designed to promote healthy use of the tool, and additional controls available to parents.

These are claims made by the manufacturer, and we report them as such: no independent verification of how those protections work is available in the sources consulted, nor are the technical criteria for age verification, the intended usage limits, or the way parental controls are activated specified.

At the same time, the company announced a collaboration with CodeAI, aimed at students and teachers, to provide tools and resources on the use of artificial intelligence. The initiative adds to the ChatGPT for Teachers program and the collaboration already underway with the American Federation of Teachers, the U.S. teachers’ union.

Why schools

The choice follows a readable market logic. School systems were the first environment in which the use of language models created a problem of rules — what is allowed in assignments, how a text produced with automated assistance should be assessed — and they are also the channel through which a product enters an age bracket that would otherwise fall outside its terms of use. Building a version explicitly aimed at teenagers, with parental controls, is a way of governing a use that is happening regardless.

The available sources do not indicate the countries where ChatGPT for Teens will be available, the activation date, or the pricing structure.

The shutdown of DALL·E

On the other side, the release notes announce that from August 30, 2026, the official DALL·E GPT within ChatGPT will be discontinued. The company urges users to download, before that date, any images they wish to keep, and points to ChatGPT Images as the tool with which to continue creating or editing images. User-created GPTs that have image generation enabled are not affected by the discontinuation.

The practical issue concerns content: anyone who produced images through that tool and has not saved them locally must do so by August 30, 2026, the deadline set by the company. The release notes do not specify whether, or for how long, the material will remain retrievable after that date. This is the kind of deadline that, in online services, tends to result in lost material simply because the notice goes unread.

The third announcement

The same notes include ChatGPT for Academic Researchers: twelve months of free access to a dedicated workspace, reserved for small, verified research groups of up to five members. Here too the structure is one of entering a sector through temporary free access, with membership verification acting as a filter.

Three moves, a single pattern: two new user segments — schools and research — and the removal of a tool replaced by an integrated feature. The date to mark on the calendar is August 30, 2026, when the discontinuation of DALL·E becomes effective.

Sources: Releasebot, OpenAI announcement on ChatGPT for Teens and CodeAI; OpenAI Help Center, official release notes.