Has been happening to me as well for the past 3 weeks. I have contacted support twice prior, and again today. Their responses have been boilerplate and say nothing is wrong…
I am on the 20x plan and paying $200/month and cannot even use the Pro services I am paying for.
With the most recent response today from support, simply telling me to cancel my subscription?? What kind of support is that???
This situation still persists to this day.
I think I am having this similar problem. Chatpgt pro 5.6 is no longer available, or rather the “intelligence” mode only allows me to select 5.5 models on the app. Issue is intermittent. I don’t think I’m being throttled and ChatGPT isn’t reporting 5.6 issues or any at this moment. Not sure what’s going on but randomly getting downgraded without feedback is frustrating.
Is this now fixed? they updated the slider and the UI and I haven’t gotten the issue yet
My issue was finally resolved after a month, and it really does appear to be IP-related. This seems to happen mainly to users who connect through VPNs or similar tools. In these cases, ChatGPT appears to silently route the Pro model to a Mini model instead. Because of this, contacting customer support is unlikely to solve the problem.
If you want to get your account back to normal, here are a few things you should know:
Stop repeatedly reporting the issue to support.
Reporting it to customer service is basically ineffective. They simply do not seem to have the ability to resolve this particular problem.
Understand how the issue works.
Even when two accounts use the exact same network node, one account may have this problem while another continues to work normally. However, more and more users seem to be experiencing it.
Switch to a different network node.
Try to find a clean, high-quality IP, preferably a genuine residential broadband connection. Make sure it is actually residential and not just advertised as such.
If you cannot find a reliable residential IP, I would suggest avoiding heavily used locations such as the United States, Hong Kong, and Japan — especially the United States. Instead, try locations that appear to be less heavily used, such as Canada, France, or South Korea.
Switch and wait.
After switching to a new network node, your account may not recover immediately if you had previously been using a problematic IP. You may need to wait one or two days.
If the account still has the same problem after two days, the new node is probably also problematic, and you may need to keep looking for a better one.
I have two Pro accounts, and both returned to normal after I switched to a new network node. I had also left them unused for several days beforehand.
I then ran an experiment with one of the accounts that had already recovered. I switched the network back to the old problematic U.S. node, and the issue returned almost instantly: the Pro model was routed to Mini again.
Even after I immediately switched back to the new node, the problem remained. The account did not return to normal until about a day later.
Based on this repeated test, I am 100% convinced that, in my case, the issue was caused by the IP/network node.
Your analysis makes a lot of sense, and many others in the community have come to similar conclusions. It’s highly likely that this is a risk-control mechanism triggered by IPs and network nodes.
However, regardless of the underlying technical logic, from a consumer’s perspective, this approach is still completely unreasonable. As a paying subscriber, my only expectation is to receive a service that matches the value I paid for, rather than being silently downgraded to a lower-tier model (Mini) without any clear notification.
More importantly, people use ChatGPT essentially as a tool to boost efficiency. In order to use this tool normally, users shouldn’t be forced to bear additional “network environment costs” (such as spending money on expensive residential IPs or wasting time and energy trying to find and switch to “clean” nodes).
The technical team needs to properly optimize its risk-control mechanisms at a technical or strategic level to prevent these widespread false positives, rather than shifting the burden of maintaining a stable service onto regular users who are already paying for it.
Same issue here I’m on a ChatGPT Plus account, and I’ve noticed that ChatGPT is consistently downgrading me to GPT-5.5-mini silently. The frontend says it’s using GPT-5.6, but when I check the network stream, the resolved_model_slug shows the mini model.
This is deceptive there’s no indication of why the downgrade is happening, and support has no idea about the issue.
Same here they are routing to gpt-5.5 mini all requests and no one from chatgpt has officially said anything its been going on for almost 15 days now.
I had the same issue. Try logging in to the ChatGPT website using a different browser, or ideally in incognito/private mode, and see if it works there.
If it does, log out, clear any saved cookies and other browsing data for chatgptcom in your regular browser, then log back in and try again.
