OpenAI pulled the plug on new enrollments in the plan ChatGPT Pro from around 200 euros per month. The cause is the rush to Astrathe flagship model launched a few days ago, which has generated a demand on the company’s servers that the top management themselves define as unprecedented.
It was announced Thibault Sottiauxknown as Tibo, the manager who follows products such as Codex and ChatGPT in OpenAI, with a post published on
The measure only concerns new subscribers. Already active Pro accounts remain intactas well as plans Go and Plus and access via API, which according to OpenAI did not suffer from the same overhead.
How long will the stop last?
The notice had arrived the day before, when Sottiaux had written to stay pulling every lever possible to withstand demand, admitting that he had never seen anything similar even in the steepest growth phases the company went through in the past. The priority, he clarified, remains to guarantee an excellent service to those who are already customers, even at the cost of temporarily closing the door to those who would like to enter now.
OpenAI did not provide a date for reopening enrollment, nor numbers on the volume of daily requests that led to the decision. The only concrete clue comes from last month, when the company had already raised the usage ceilings for Codex: a sign that the pressure on the systems is not something new in the last week, but has been dragging on for longer.
Astra was launched on September 3 and is progressively expanding across all subscription levels, from Pro to Plus, up to Enterprise and Business accounts, as well as APIs. The model aims at a leap in reasoning skills, in writing code and in the autonomous use of the computer, terrains on which competition between large laboratories is now played out week by week.
To make sure our current users have an incredible experience and continued access to Astra, we are going to pause subscriptions to our $200 Pro plan. These put the most strain on our systems and we wanted to take the smallest step that allows us to continue giving the broadest… https://t.co/WhLEm3HBL7
— Tibo (@thsottiaux) September 10, 2026
OpenAI presented it as the beginning of the so-called it was AGIa generational leap compared to previous models. Statements of this type must be taken with a pinch of salt, as always when they come from those who have every interest in inflating the anticipation around their product: the fact remains that, according to what has been reported, the available computing capacity has not kept pace with real demand.
The blocking of Pro subscriptions, in this sense, says more about the infrastructural limits of OpenAI than about the real capabilities of Astra. It often happens in the industry that a successful launch turns into a scalability problem within a few days: the difference, this time, is that the company admits it publicly instead of letting users discover it for themselves by trying to sign up for a plan that is no longer available.
In short, it is not yet known whether the pause will last days or weeks, and whether in the meantime the company will be able to add sufficient capacity without affecting the quality of service promised to those who already pay for the 200 euro plan.
