What OpenAI changed
OpenAI has stopped taking new subscriptions and upgrades to its $200-a-month ChatGPT Pro plan, citing demand for GPT-6 Astra, the model it released on 3 September. Thibault Sottiaux, who leads Codex and ChatGPT at OpenAI, announced the pause in a post on X on 10 September, saying those subscriptions “put the most strain on our systems”.
Sottiaux said there was no impact on existing accounts and that all other plans and the API remain available. He described the move as the smallest step OpenAI could take while keeping access as broad as possible, and said the company was adding capacity “as fast as we can”. He did not say when sign-ups would reopen.
The paused tier, which Fortune reports provides 20 times the usage of Plus, is OpenAI’s most expensive consumer plan. The Next Web reported that the $100 Pro plan remains on sale, along with Plus, Go, the API and enterprise accounts. TechCrunch also listed Business and Enterprise accounts as unaffected.
A warning a day and a half earlier
The pause did not come without notice. On 9 September, Sottiaux wrote that “Demand for Astra is really unprecedented”. He said OpenAI was “pulling all the levers possible”, that he had not seen anything like it despite earlier periods of very steep growth, and that the company might have to pause new Pro subscriptions if demand continued.
Pro subscribers were among the first to get the model. On 4 September, Sottiaux said that Pro and Business subscriptions were receiving Astra first, with the rollout to all Plus users to follow as fast as possible. Fortune reported that Astra’s computer use feature, which lets it operate a desktop the way a person would, can burn through usage allowances faster than GPT-5.6 Sol, OpenAI’s previous flagship model.
It has happened before
OpenAI has rationed a subscription once before. In November 2023 it temporarily halted sign-ups to its $20-a-month ChatGPT Plus plan after its DevDay developer conference. Sam Altman wrote at the time that “the surge in usage post devday has exceeded our capacity”, as Fortune recalled.
The difference this time is where the line has been drawn. In 2023 OpenAI closed Plus. Now it has closed only the $200 tier, the plan that carries the most usage per subscriber, and kept the cheaper plans on sale.
The compute behind it
OpenAI’s capacity has grown quickly, and by its own account not quickly enough. In a 12 February 2026 update to the US House Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, the company said its available compute grew 9.5 times between 2023 and 2025: from 0.2 GW in 2023 to 0.6 GW in 2024 and about 1.9 GW in 2025. It said revenue had followed the same trajectory, and that limited compute continued to delay its ability to deliver “new, in-demand features”.
Much larger additions are lined up. Fortune notes that OpenAI has arranged a wave of new capacity beginning in the second half of 2026, including at least 10 GW of Nvidia systems, a 6 GW GPU agreement with AMD and a Broadcom partnership to deploy 10 GW of custom AI accelerators.
What to watch
OpenAI has given neither a reopening date nor the conditions under which the $200 plan would return. Two signals will show whether the strain is easing: whether the $100 Pro tier stays on sale, and how quickly Astra reaches all Plus subscribers, which Sottiaux said would follow the Pro and Business rollout. The capacity Fortune describes is scheduled to begin arriving in the second half of this year, a period that has already started.
