How To Save Your Custom GPTs Before They Disappear
Ten minutes now saves you rebuilding from memory in December.
You built a custom GPT that knows your prices and answers the way you do. You use it every week. On 11 December it stops working, and the page it lives on goes with it.
A custom GPT is a set of written instructions and uploaded files that ChatGPT follows every time you open it, so saving it mostly means saving that writing somewhere you control.
The whole thing on video, three minutes.
If you have never made a custom GPT, none of this touches you. Your chats, your account and your projects are all fine. One feature is retiring, on a known date, and it can be moved.
How do you find out which custom GPTs you have?
The usual mistake is assuming you remember. Most people made one in a spare hour, forgot about it, and have one other they genuinely rely on.
Open ChatGPT and go to My GPTs, or the Plugins section in the left sidebar where they now sit. That list is everything you have built. Be honest about which ones you actually use. The one you open every week is the one worth ten minutes.
How do you copy a custom GPT’s instructions out?
Asking the GPT to tell you its own instructions does not work. It hands back a tidied summary, not the thing you wrote, and a normal chat has no idea your GPT exists.
Open the GPT for editing instead. The instructions box shows exactly what you told it, notes and formatting included. Select the lot, copy it, and paste it into a Word or Google doc with Cmd+Shift+V so it comes across as plain text. Download any files you uploaded to it as well.
Label the document with the GPT’s name and save it. That is the migration done. Everything after this is choosing where it lives next.
How do you move a custom GPT into Claude?
Pasting your old instructions into a fresh chat each time works once, then you forget. You want it saved so it runs the same way every time.
Get Bedrock Ry’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
In Claude, start a chat, type skill creator, and paste in the instructions you saved. Then add these lines on the end, so it treats them as rules rather than a one-off request.
[paste the instructions you saved in step 2] These are your standing rules. Follow them for every message in this project without me repeating them. If something isn’t covered here, ask me instead of guessing.
Claude builds it as a skill, gives it a name, and from then on you type a forward slash and that name to pull it up. Mine came back slightly better than the original, because it folded in the personal rules I already keep in Claude, like British English. Save or download the skill when it is done.
How do you keep a custom GPT working inside ChatGPT?
Waiting for a migrate button that may not reach your account is how this gets left until December.
Make a new Project instead, named after the old GPT. Projects are on the free plan and are not part of the change. Open its instructions box and paste in what you saved, with the same lines on the end.
[paste the instructions you saved in step 2] These are your standing rules. Follow them for every message in this project without me repeating them. If something isn’t covered here, ask me instead of guessing.
Upload the files you downloaded into the project too. That is most of what a custom GPT was: instructions it remembers, plus your files. You lose the shareable page, and for a small team you will barely notice.
Where would you not use this?
If your GPT connects to another service through a custom action, copying the instructions will not bring that across. Rebuilding it is a proper technical job, so get whoever set it up to look now.
If you shared it with staff or customers, they lose it on the day. Tell them, and send them the new version yourself.
Check what you are pasting. If customer names, phone numbers or account details ever ended up in those instructions or files, strip them out before they go anywhere new.
And dates move. I recorded this in September 2026, so open OpenAI’s help page before you act and check it still says 11 December.
What should you do this week?
Open My GPTs, copy the instructions out of the one you actually use, download its files, and put them in a folder on your computer. Ten minutes, and nothing to pay.
The valuable thing was never the GPT. It was the writing inside it: your prices, your rules, the way you talk to customers. That belongs in a file you own.
That is what The Business Brain gives you. One interview, and AI stops guessing about your business, in a document nobody can retire. Twenty-seven quid.
