Custom GPTs and Claude Design Both Shut Down in December, and Not Everything Moves Over

Two AI tools are going away within days of each other. OpenAI plans to retire custom GPTs in ChatGPT on December 11, 2026, and move them to plugins. Anthropic will close the standalone Claude Design site on December 14, 2026, and fold it into Claude as artifacts. In both cases some things carry over and some don't, and each company's help center spells out which is which.

Custom GPTs retire on December 11

OpenAI's help center says custom GPTs are scheduled to retire on December 11, 2026, on all ChatGPT plans. After that date, the GPTs and their GPT pages become inaccessible. Enterprise workspaces with an approved deferral get until February 11, 2027, and OpenAI says that extension doesn't apply to every workspace. For affected Enterprise workspaces, OpenAI's timeline also lists October 26 as the planned date when creating new custom GPTs ends, and it notes that all of these dates are subject to change.

The replacement is plugins. If you made a GPT, OpenAI says a Migrate to plugin option will show up on your My GPTs page once migration is available for your account, and it may not reach every account at the same time. The GPT's instructions become a skill inside the new plugin, its knowledge files are copied over as reference files, and any connected apps come along as apps. Migration uses the latest published version, so drafts and unpublished edits are left behind. Publishing a GPT for this is only for migration and doesn't mean sharing it publicly. Once a GPT is migrated, the original keeps working until retirement but becomes read-only.

Several things don't make the trip. The model you picked for the GPT doesn't carry over. Custom actions, the integrations that let a GPT call another service, don't transfer at all, and OpenAI says rebuilding one may take a custom MCP server and some technical setup. Sharing settings don't carry over either. A migrated plugin starts out private, the people who used your GPT don't automatically get access to it, and making it public goes through a separate submission process. OpenAI also suggests saving a few prompts you know well so you can check whether the plugin answers the way your GPT did.

Your past chats are the one thing you don't need to worry about. OpenAI says existing conversations with custom GPTs will stay accessible after retirement, and you don't need to do anything to keep them. If you only use someone else's GPT, you can't migrate it yourself, so OpenAI's advice is to watch for a notice on the GPT and any word from its creator about a replacement.

Claude Design closes on December 14

Anthropic says the standalone Claude Design site at claude.ai/design will close on December 14, 2026, and you can keep using it until then. After that, the address takes you to Claude, where new designs, design systems and slide decks are created as artifacts. Claude Design is available on the Free, Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise plans.

Design systems are the part Anthropic wants you to move now. You start the migration from the Artifacts page in Claude, and one run brings over every design system in your organization, including ones other people made. Empty design systems aren't migrated, and neither are ones built from a starter theme, even if you've edited them. On Team and Enterprise plans, published design systems that aren't private will be shared with everyone in the organization. Anthropic also notes that design systems are off by default on Enterprise plans, so an owner may need to turn them on first. After migration, you can't edit a design system directly on its page yet; Anthropic says to ask Claude to make changes.

Projects don't need anything from you yet, Anthropic says. They stay in the standalone version and keep working until it closes, and Anthropic says more details on moving them to Claude are coming soon. If you'd rather not wait, you can download projects one at a time as a zip archive from each project's Share menu, which Anthropic says is free and doesn't count toward usage limits. Organizations with zero data retention can't turn on artifacts, so they can't migrate at all, and Anthropic tells them to download their projects before the site closes.

Some things won't come along no matter what. Your chats with Claude and the comments on your projects and design systems stay in the standalone version and will be deleted after it closes. Public links to standalone projects will stop working. The originals of your design systems and projects are deleted too. Anthropic's own advice is to save anything you need from your chats and comments before December 14.

What to sort out first

The two shutdowns ask different things of you. With custom GPTs, your chat history is safe, but custom actions, sharing settings and the chosen model need attention, and anything still in draft needs to be published before you migrate. With Claude Design, the design systems can move today, but chats, comments and public links will be gone after December 14, and project migration hasn't been spelled out yet. We'll update this article when Anthropic publishes those details.