OpenAIsays it is deprecating GPT-4.5 API access in favor of GPT-4.1, citing the performance and cost efficiency of the GPT-4.1 family.

GPT-4.5 has long been one of the company’s more popular AI models, but the GPT-4.1 family outscores it in a number of situations, according to the company’s blog post.

• Coding: GPT‑4.1 scores 54.6% on SWE-bench Verified, improving by 21.4%abs over GPT‑4o and 26.6%abs over GPT‑4.5—making it a leading model for coding.
• Instruction following: On Scale’s MultiChallenge⁠(opens in a new window) benchmark, a measure of instruction following ability, GPT‑4.1 scores 38.3%, a 10.5%abs increase over GPT‑4o.
• Long context: On Video-MME⁠(opens in a new window), a benchmark for multimodal long context understanding, GPT‑4.1 sets a new state-of-the-art result—scoring 72.0% on the long, no subtitles category, a 6.7%abs improvement over GPT‑4o.

The company emphasizes that it built the GPT-4.1 family for real-world utility.

While benchmarks provide valuable insights, we trained these models with a focus on real-world utility. Close collaboration and partnership with the developer community enabled us to optimize these models for the tasks that matter most to their applications.

To this end, the GPT‑4.1 model family offers exceptional performance at a lower cost. These models push performance forward at every point on the latency curve.

OpenAI says the GPT-4.1 family is particularly well suited to agent-type tasks.

These improvements in instruction following reliability and long context comprehension also make the GPT‑4.1 models considerably more effective at powering agents, or systems that can independently accomplish tasks on behalf of users. When combined with primitives like the Responses API⁠(opens in a new window), developers can now build agents that are more useful and reliable at real-world software engineering, extracting insights from large documents, resolving customer requests with minimal hand-holding, and other complex tasks.

As OpenAI points out, GPT-4.1 is only available via API access.

Note that GPT‑4.1 will only be available via the API. In ChatGPT, many of the improvements in instruction following, coding, and intelligence have been gradually incorporated into the latest version⁠(opens in a new window) of GPT‑4o, and we will continue to incorporate more with future releases.

The company says GPT-4.1 is a major step forward, one that should be a major step forward for developers.

GPT‑4.1 is a significant step forward in the practical application of AI. By focusing closely on real-world developer needs—ranging from coding to instruction-following and long context understanding—these models unlock new possibilities for building intelligent systems and sophisticated agentic applications. We’re continually inspired by the developer community’s creativity, and are excited to see what you build with GPT‑4.1.