OpenAI has temporarily paused new sign-ups for its $200-per-month Pro plan, citing unprecedented demand for its newest model, Astra, which launched on September 3. The announcement came from Thibault Sottiaux, OpenAI's product leader for Codex and ChatGPT, who said the Pro tier places the most strain on the company's infrastructure.
The company warned of the move a day earlier, with Sottiaux writing on X that demand for Astra is really unprecedented and that the team is pulling all available levers to sustain it. He noted that OpenAI's other plans — including the API, and lower-cost Go and Plus tiers — remain fully available.
OpenAI has not disclosed how long Pro sign-ups will remain disabled or how many users are joining daily. The company raised Codex usage limits as recently as last month, suggesting the demand surge is a very recent phenomenon tied directly to Astra's launch.
Astra has been rolling out across all OpenAI plan tiers — Pro, Plus, Enterprise, and Business — and promises major advances in reasoning, coding, and computer use, all areas of intense competition. OpenAI has described Astra as the beginning of the AGI era and a generational leap, language that has further fueled adoption.
The pause is a rare move for OpenAI, which has generally expanded access rather than constrained it. It signals that even the largest AI labs are hitting real infrastructure limits when a model generates sufficient demand — a problem that money alone cannot immediately solve.