Deprecated: still answering, no longer recommended
Deprecated means a thing still works and is no longer the thing to start new work on. It is borrowed from software, where the word has a settled meaning, and it carries no date. A model can sit deprecated for a long time, and treating the word as a countdown produces migrations nobody needed. As of 2026-09-22.
| The word does say | The word does not say |
|---|---|
| Available today | When it stops being available |
| Not the recommended choice | Whether a successor exists |
| New work should go elsewhere | Whether existing work keeps running |
| Somebody has thought about its future | That a date has been written down |
Inclusion rule. Usage as it recurs across vendor announcements. No vendor in this register publishes a glossary, so none of this is a definition anybody has agreed to. Order. What the word carries first, then what readers assume.
1Why the software meaning travels badly
In a codebase, deprecated means the maintainers have committed to keeping something working while discouraging its use, and removal will be announced separately. That contract exists because the code and its users are in the same repository.
A hosted model has no such contract. The word arrives with the same reassuring shape and none of the machinery behind it, which is why this register records the word and the presence or absence of a date as two different facts.
2The word is not a countdown
Teams read deprecated as a warning shot and start migrating. Sometimes that is right, and in this field a model can carry the label for a long stretch with nothing happening, because no page commits the vendor to anything by using it.
The useful response is to check whether a date exists somewhere, and to keep using the model if not. Migrating on a word rather than on a date spends a production's budget on a schedule nobody published.
3What to look for instead
A dated row on a lifecycle page, a notice period stated in days or months, or a named successor. Those are the three things that turn a label into a plan, and most entries in this register publish none of them.
Where a vendor uses the word and publishes a date beside it, the date is the fact. The label only tells a reader the vendor was thinking about the model's future when it wrote the page.
A definition rather than a dated entry: no line above is a vendor statement. Where this word turns up in a real notice, the wording and the date are on the lifecycle states column. Nearby terms: Retirement date, Shutdown, End-of-life.