Updated November 7, 2026 · 6 min read
If you open the GPT store today, ChatGPT shows a banner: GPTs will be retired on December 11. OpenAI's retirement FAQ says the same, with dates: new GPTs can no longer be created, creators can migrate their GPTs to the new plugins, and on December 11, 2026 custom GPTs stop running. Enterprise workspaces can ask for an extension to February 2027. Everyone else gets December 11.
The part that matters if you have been using GPTs rather than building them: the migration carries the GPT's instructions, its files and its connected apps. OpenAI's FAQ does not say your conversations go with it, and once a GPT is migrated the original becomes read-only. What happens to those conversations is the part OpenAI's FAQ leaves out, so here is the best available answer. Users whose GPTs already disappeared (deleted by their creators, or stopped working) report the same thing: the chats stayed in their history and turned into regular ChatGPT chats they could keep writing in. The GPT behind them was gone, so no more custom instructions and no more knowledge files, but the conversation itself continued. If December 11 goes the same way, you don't lose the chat. You lose the assistant.
That changes the priorities. If you built a GPT, the thing to save is the GPT itself: its instructions, its conversation starters and its files, which live only in the editor. If you used someone else's, the conversation stays, but it continues as plain ChatGPT. For work that depended on what the GPT knew, the real question is where you continue it with that knowledge.
So this guide is about the conversations. Months of work with a research GPT, a writing GPT, a GPT set up for your job: here is how to get it out, in rough order of how much it keeps.
In the ChatGPT sidebar, GPT chats are listed like any other conversation, but the address bar tells them apart: a GPT chat lives at chatgpt.com/g/g-…/c/…. Open the GPT itself and its name appears at the top of the chat. Make a short list of the GPTs you rely on and, for each, whether you built it or someone else did. That decides which of the steps below you need.
Settings, Data controls, Export data. OpenAI emails you a zip with all your conversations, GPT chats included, as JSON and an HTML viewer. It is complete and it is the right thing to do once, as a backup.
Good for: a full legal copy of everything.
Bad for: working with any single conversation. The chats are one big file, not separate documents, and you can't feed them to another AI as context without extracting them first.
Open the GPT, choose Edit, and go to the Configure tab. Three things live only there and nowhere else: the instructions, the conversation starters and the list of knowledge files. Copy the instructions and the starters into a text file, and locate the files you uploaded (keep the originals; the editor doesn't give them back). Do this before migrating: after migration the original GPT is read-only, and after December 11 the editor is gone.
Those instructions are what you need to rebuild the same assistant anywhere else. A Claude Project takes a set of instructions and files. Gemini's custom assistants (Gems, now being replaced by Skills) do the same. The GPT itself is going away; its brain is a text file you can keep.
Good for: creators.
Bad for: users of someone else's GPT. You can't see its instructions, and access to a public GPT does not guarantee access to its replacement plugin.
Full disclosure: this is our tool. The other methods on this page are real alternatives.
ThreadPort is a Chrome and Edge extension. Open the GPT conversation, click the icon, press Download .md, and you get that conversation as a clean Markdown file: every message, both sides labeled, headings and code intact, attachments noted. It works on GPT chats exactly as on normal ones; we tested it on the GPT store's featured GPTs in late October. Markdown export is free with no limit, and nothing leaves your browser.
Do this for the conversations you would miss. Ten chats take a couple of minutes. The result is a folder of files you can search, read, and paste into any other assistant.
Good for: keeping the conversations you care about, as documents.
Bad for: backing up hundreds of chats you never reopen. Use method 1 for those.
Exporting is rarely the goal. The goal is to keep doing whatever you were doing with the GPT. Two steps:
Order matters. Move the conversations you are in the middle of first, before December 11, while the GPT still answers and you can check nothing was lost. Archive the rest with method 1 whenever.
Migrated GPTs continue as plugins after December 11, according to the in-app banner. You may be able to keep using the same assistant under its new form, if the creator made it available to you. Your old conversations stay in your history and, going by what happened to users whose GPTs already disappeared, they continue as regular ChatGPT chats without the GPT's instructions and files. Save the ones that matter anyway, and move the ones that depended on what the GPT knew.
| You… | Do |
|---|---|
| Want one complete backup of everything | 1. OpenAI's data export |
| Built a GPT and want to rebuild it elsewhere | 2. Save instructions and files, then 4 |
| Have GPT conversations you want to keep as documents | 3. Download .md per chat |
| Are mid-task in a GPT chat | 4. Move it to Claude or Gemini and continue |
| Use someone else's GPT | 3 now, then check if a plugin replaces it |
OpenAI's FAQ gives December 11, 2026 as the scheduled retirement, for all plans. Enterprise workspaces can request an extension to February 2027. OpenAI notes the dates may change, so check the FAQ and the banner in the GPT store.
OpenAI's FAQ doesn't say. Users whose GPTs already disappeared report that the chats stayed in their history and became regular ChatGPT chats they could continue, with no GPT behind them. Expect the same: the conversation stays, the GPT's instructions and files don't.
Nothing in OpenAI's FAQ says so. The migration covers the GPT's instructions, files and connected apps, and after migration the original GPT is read-only. Treat your conversations as something you have to save yourself.
Either OpenAI's full data export (Settings, Data controls), which gives you every conversation in one zip, or a per-conversation export with a browser extension such as ThreadPort, which saves the open chat as a Markdown file.
Yes. Open the GPT chat, click ThreadPort and choose the destination. A new tab opens with the full conversation pasted and framed as a continuation. Add the GPT's instructions at the top if you have them, and the other assistant picks up where the GPT left off.
Save your GPT conversations before December 11. Markdown file, or straight into Claude, Gemini, Perplexity or Mistral. On your machine, no account.
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