At 12:45 p.m. KST on August 21, 2026, the AI news account NIK (@ns123abc) claimed that "OpenAI said 'don't worry, we have compute' and then secretly cut ChatGPT quotas by 76% the very next day," quoting an August 19 reply ("Do not worry, we have compute") from Codex lead Tibo Sottiaux. The post passed 35,000 views in a day, with reactions like "I got fooled" and "I'm moving to Cursor."
The 76% figure: where does it come from?
The figure is a claim from NIK's personal account, and no measurement method or data was published with it. Tibo's original reply was actually a joking reply aimed at @ClaudeDevs, which NIK later reused as grounds for criticism. No official material supporting the specific "76% cut" number has been confirmed.
That said, complaints that usage runs out faster than before are not new. A report on the OpenAI Codex GitHub repository also says "ChatGPT Work drains the Codex quota without warning."
Tibo pointed to sub2api
At 8:43 p.m. KST the same evening, Tibo laid out the situation in his own post. He said he "investigated messages saying Codex usage limits had changed" and that "many of the affected users were using sub2api, a way of converting a subscription into an API." If you convert a subscription into API traffic and redistribute it to multiple people, anti-fraud systems can flag it as abnormal usage and apply limits.
Tibo also made clear that "not every cause has been confirmed." The investigation is ongoing, and he added that he'll share more as things are confirmed.
20 million users, and banked resets
In the same post, Tibo said Codex passed 20 million active users this week and announced that all Codex and ChatGPT Work users would receive a "banked reset." Unlike a reset you use immediately, a banked reset is stored in your account so you can use it whenever you choose. He also said the stretch from 10 million to 20 million, 5 million users more than the previous milestone interval, was "the fastest gap between milestones" (earlier teaser post).
The credit rollout itself wasn't smooth either. According to media reports, users kept reporting that they hadn't received their reset even after the announced deadline of 8 p.m. Pacific Time on August 22 (explainx.ai). If your usage seems to be running out strangely fast, the safer move is to first check whether you use a subscription-conversion tool that redistributes access, and then wait for official announcements.