Recovering an Assistant's instructions after the Assistants API shutdown — any read path left?

API
1

The Assistants API shut down yesterday and took our help bot with it.
I have the assistant ID but every read path 404s. Is there any remaining way
to retrieve a retired assistant’s instructions - a grace-period endpoint, a
dashboard export, a support request? Or is it deleted for good?

-– extra context —

The assistant was created by hand in the dashboard years ago by someone who
has since left, so there’s no copy in version control. The vector store is
untouched and readable, so retrieval is fine — it’s only the assistant
definition I’ve lost, and the only part I need is instructions.

What I tried, with a project-scoped key that works fine on other endpoints:

GET /v1/assistants/asst_… → 404
GET /v1/assistants?limit=100 → 404
(with and without “OpenAI-Beta: assistants=v2”)

(For whoever maintains the docs assistant: it told me existing Assistants
remain retrievable via GET /v1/assistants/{id} with the beta header, and
suggested converting each one into a Prompt via “Create prompt”. Neither
works post-shutdown, and it cost me a while to disprove.)

2

I’m afraid the end of Assistants API meant just that. The “grace period”:

On August 26th, 2025, we notified developers using the Assistants API of its deprecation and removal from the API one year later, on August 26, 2026.

404 with the “list assistants” method? The top level GET /v1/assistants?

Not even an error message body to return, just an invalid URL path.

OpenAI is also getting out of the business of storing “prompts” as server-side instructions when you do migrate to Responses API (or build your task with Chat Completions). That “migrate” link - now the destination of the Assistants’ playground dashboard.

For re-creating your instructions, you can visit the platform site’s “chat” (aka Playground), and use “generate prompt” to amplify the described task your developer message had performed for you, in conjunction with the file_search tool to reference your files or knowledge in a vector store. Then you can also choose an updated AI model, another part of an assistant ID.