Gemini 2.5 gets a hard date: 16 October
Google Cloud's Vertex AI release notes record, in an update dated 2 October, that the retirement dates for Gemini 2.5 Pro, 2.5 Flash and 2.5 Flash-Lite have been set to 16 October 2026. This completes what the API changelog started on 18 September, when access to the 2.5 line was restricted to recently-active accounts.
The gate became a wall, with a date you can put in a calendar. Anything still pinned to a 2.5 model — your own automations, a smaller wrapper that shipped its integration last year — has days, not months, to move or find out what its vendor's auto-migration does to output quality. A tool that cannot name the model it replaced 2.5 with is telling you the swap was not a decision.