OpenAI Pauses New ChatGPT Pro Signups Amid Astra Demand

OpenAI confirmed on September 10 that it has paused new sign-ups for ChatGPT Pro, its most expensive tier, priced at $200 a month in the United States (about €229 in France and Germany). The announcement came from Tibo Sottiaux, who leads core ChatGPT and Codex products, posted on X: the company is "pulling all the levers possible" to expand computing capacity, but demand triggered by GPT-6 Astra is "really unprecedented," outpacing the growth curves of every previous launch.

Why Astra is overwhelming the servers

GPT-6 Astra launched on September 3, described by OpenAI executives as "the start of the AGI era." The model was trained on more than 100,000 GPUs at the Stargate data center in Texas, and can operate a computer — spreadsheets, forms, browsing — at what OpenAI calls superhuman speed. Rolled out quickly to Plus and Pro subscribers, it triggered a surge in usage that outstripped expectations within days. On September 9, Sottiaux had already warned that interest was exceeding OpenAI's previous, already explosive launches; by the next day, new sign-ups were closed.

To make sure our current users have a great experience and continued access to Astra, we're going to temporarily pause new subscriptions to our $200 Pro plan.

Who is affected, and who isn't

The pause only targets new customers: existing Pro subscribers keep unlimited access to Astra, with no added restrictions. The cheaper Go and Plus plans, the business-focused Business and Enterprise tiers, and the API used by developers all remain open. OpenAI gave no reopening date, saying only that it is adding capacity — far from a firm timeline.

• Affected: new customers trying to sign up for the $200-a-month ChatGPT Pro plan
• Not affected: existing Pro subscribers, the Go and Plus plans, Business and Enterprise
• Not affected: developers calling the model through the API

Closing sign-ups for a plan that loses money on every customer might look like common sense: Sam Altman admitted back in January 2025 that Pro subscribers used the service so heavily that OpenAI lost money on each of them, and nothing suggests that math has flipped with an even more compute-hungry model. OpenAI also profits another way: on its consumer tiers (Free, Plus, Pro), conversations are used by default to train future models unless a user opts out in settings (Business, Enterprise accounts and the API are excluded). A heavy Astra user's data may be worth as much as their subscription fee.

Not OpenAI's first time hitting the brakes

The script isn't new. In November 2023, the day after its first developer conference, OpenAI already paused ChatGPT Plus sign-ups after being overwhelmed by demand, taking a full month to reopen. This past July, Chinese startup Moonshot AI went through the same ordeal with its Kimi K3 model: subscriptions froze 48 hours after launch, then reopened in batches as new servers arrived. Compute shortages don't pick sides.

Anthropic chose the opposite path

Facing the same compute crunch, competitors made different calls. Anthropic, this spring, let everyone in while tightening Claude's usage limits, triggering a backlash from Claude Code users in March and April. In late April, the company admitted to three engineering missteps, including a cut to default reasoning effort meant to shorten response times, while insisting it never deliberately degraded its models. On May 6, it signed a deal with SpaceX — by then also the owner of xAI — for more than 300 megawatts and 220,000 Nvidia GPUs, and doubled its usage limits soon after. Neither Google, with Gemini, nor Anthropic, with Claude, has so far announced a comparable freeze on their priciest paid tiers: two opposite strategies facing the same chip shortage.

What it means for a Pro-curious user today

For anyone trying to sign up for ChatGPT Pro today, the answer is blunt: the sign-up page is closed, with no reopening date in sight. Anyone wanting partial access to Astra's capabilities right now is left with the cheaper Plus plan, which carries tighter usage caps, or waiting for Pro to reopen. Existing Pro subscribers keep unrestricted access to the model OpenAI says has crossed the AGI threshold. The episode is a reminder that even for a company as well-funded as OpenAI, compute capacity — not demand itself — remains the real bottleneck on how fast AI services can scale.